Non-English unicode fonts in Safari

On Jan 28, 2008, at 12:20 AM, Harald Sundt wrote:

> Radio Free Asia is an important site for Tibetans, Mongolians and
> other
> minorities in Asia where they can read news in their own language.
> A Tibetan needs to read http://www.rfa.org/tibetan/ - but fonts
> don't show!
>
> My friend, a Tibetan Buddhist Teacher has a Mac G-4. I have an
> Intel Mac
> Pro tower.
>
> Both of us has Tibetan fonts installed.
>
> • TibetanMachineUnicodeFont (TibetanMachineUniAlpha.ttf)
>
> • LTibetan etc...TrueType Fonts 1, 2, 3, 4
>
> • LTibetan etc... Screen Fonts
>
> But the web page still is English letter gibberish.
>
> What can we do?

Safari has a preference that allows you to specify your own CSS
stylesheet that will override styles supplied by the web server.

Create a plain text file with the following in it. If you use
TextEdit, make sure the file is plain text by clicking Format | Make
Plain Text.

* {
        font-family: TibetanMachineUnicodeFont;
}

Save the file and in Safari open Preferences | Advanced. Click the
Style Sheet menu and click Other. In the open dialog window, find the
file you saved, select it, and click Choose. The asterisk in your
stylesheet is a "wildcard" character that matches every HTML tag so
the style will be applied to every part of the web page.

This stylesheet will apply to *every* web page you open, not only
ones that use a Tibetan font so other web pages will look different
but assuming the Unicode font contains the Latin character set, other
web sites will still be readable. If you find other sites are not
readable in this font, go back to Preferences | Advanced and in the
Style Sheet menu click "None Selected."

On Jan 27, 2008, at 10:20 PM, Harald Sundt wrote:

> Both of us has Tibetan fonts installed.
>
> • TibetanMachineUnicodeFont (TibetanMachineUniAlpha.ttf)
>
> • LTibetan etc...TrueType Fonts 1, 2, 3, 4
>
> • LTibetan etc... Screen Fonts
>
> But the web page still is English letter gibberish.
>
> What can we do?

Unfortunately it is not Unicode. I think you need the custom font
TCRC Youtsoweb, which that site lets you download but only in .exe
form for Windows.

Here is a place you can download the font in .ttf form:

http://www.savetibet.org/ti/help.php

I think you may have to use the Opera Browser instead of Safari or
Firefox:

http://www.opera.com/

Some more info on Unicode Tibetan is here:

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/typingtibetan.html

On 27-Jan-2008, at 22:20, Harald Sundt wrote:
> Radio Free Asia is an important site for Tibetans, Mongolians and
> other
> minorities in Asia where they can read news in their own language.
> A Tibetan needs to read http://www.rfa.org/tibetan/ - but fonts
> don't show!

I looked at the source code for that site and it says in the header
that it is using UTF-8 encoding, but then looking at the actual source
code, it doesn't look like UTF-8 to me.

On 29 janv. 08, at 01:56, Tom Gewecke wrote:

> On Jan 27, 2008, at 10:20 PM, Harald Sundt wrote:
> Unfortunately it is not Unicode. I think you need the custom font
> TCRC Youtsoweb, which that site lets you download but only in .exe
> form for Windows.
>
> Here is a place you can download the font in .ttf form:
>
> http://www.savetibet.org/ti/help.php

Indeed that does the trick (I've downloaded all three of the fonts
from the linked page). My Tibetan is too rusty to actually understand
much, but it's perfectly readable.

>
>
> I think you may have to use the Opera Browser instead of Safari or
> Firefox:
No, this works fine in Safari too.

Cyril