Wednesday 19 August 2009

Rendering ancient languages with CSS3 font-face

Re-reading The Decipherment of Linear B led me to revisit the CSS3 feature @font-face and to address my ignorance of Unicode.

As always it is just about to be ready, really. The browsers which work: Firefox 3.5.2, Android cupcake, Safari (Mac). The browsers which fail: IE6, Firefox 3.0, Konqueror, Safari (iPhone). Opera works, but assumes one font per character sequence.

Unicode has Linear B sorted and will have Egyptian done sometime soon (October 2009).

There are some very nice, free fonts created by George Douros.

See the resulting Browser Unicode rendering test page.