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BGonline.org Forums
Underlines and overbars
Posted By: Taper_Mike In Response To: Underlines and overbars (Nack Ballard)
Date: Monday, 2 January 2012, at 6:15 a.m.
Michael has got you onto the easiest way to enter the Unicode character for the combining overbar. The reason you sometimes see boxes in IE9 instead of the combining over bar is because the font being used to display it does not contain the combining over bar. The boxes are placeholders for characters that are not defined within a given font. In XP, the only reliably present font that has a nearly complete represention of Unicode characters is Arial Unicode MS. For better or worse, BGO uses Times New Roman for most of its text. For XP users, that means worse, because the Times New Roman delivered with Windows XP in not a Unicode font. Under Vista and Win7, it is, and so are many others.
Your experience gives a strong indication that we should stick to Arial Unicode MS for nacbracs if we are to maintain the widest possible audience. There are many millions of XP users who do not have any other Unicode font.
I just reviewed the Wikipedia page for Arial Unicode MS. Among many other things, it says:
In digital typography, the TrueType font Arial Unicode MS is an extended version of the font Arial. Compared to Arial, it includes higher line height, omits kerning pairs and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of Unicode 2.1—thus supporting most Microsoft code pages, but also requiring much more storage space (22 megabytes).[1] It also adds Ideographic layout tables, but unlike Arial, it mandates no smoothing in the 14–18 point range, and contains Roman (upright) glyphs only; there is no oblique (italic) version. Arial Unicode MS is normally distributed with Microsoft Office, but it is also bundled with Mac OS X v10.5 and later. It may also be purchased separately (as Arial Unicode) from Ascender Corporation, who licenses the font from Microsoft.
The font is also apparently licensed to Apple, who announced on October 16, 2007 that their flagship operating system, Mac OS X v10.5 ("Leopard"), would be bundled with Arial Unicode.[4] Leopard also ships with several other previously Microsoft-only fonts, including Microsoft Sans Serif, Tahoma and Wingdings.
This latter statement means that we do not have to use Helvetica as a fallback font in CSS styles that specify Arial Unicode MS. Users of newer Macs will have Arial Unicode MS.
The former is a reminder that Arial Unicode MS does not contain glyphs for italic characters. They are simulated during the rendering process, and so are not as attractive as those that are defined within other fonts. The absence of kerning pairs and smoothing means that the font will not be rendered in the most attractive way on low res devices such as computer monitors.
To test the over bar, you should use letters like B, E, F, I, J, P, R, and T. These are characters that already have a horizontal stroke at the top. If the over bar is going to interfere, it will be with these letters.
Here is a test of Arial Unicode MS using the combining over bar:
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (regular)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (italic)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (underlined)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (underlined italics)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (regular)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (italic)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (underlined)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (underlined italics)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (regular)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (italic)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (underlined)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (underlined italics)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (regular)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (italic)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (underlined)
B̅ E̅ F̅ I̅ J̅ P̅ R̅ T̅ (underlined italics)
On my computer (Win7, IE9) this doesn’t look so good. The combining over bar interferes with all of the characters in all of the sizes. Mike
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