SuttaCentral
from today without my tampering with my browser settings (the setting is still Unicode UTF-8) some Pali characters are no longer displayed in my browser so just checking whether something has been changed on the backend in terms of encoding and whether it’s observed by other users as well
thank you
Oops, something is broken, obviously. We have today rolled out, after extensive testing, some changes in how we are delivering fonts on the site. It works fine for me, but obviously there’s some work do do before it’s perfect.
Can you please specify some details of your system: browser, OS, any extensions or modifications that might affect this?
Also, can you check http://staging.suttacentral.net/ ? Does the same problem appear there?
yes, it’s the same on the Staging, my system is Windows XP SP3, browser Chrome v 30.0.1599.101 (not up-to-date, but it’s been reliable so far), nothing has been added to/removed from the system recently
no problem in Mozilla FF though
Ahh, well, I’m not sure if we can help with that. XP was deprecated 2 years ago, and Chrome 30 is 20 releases behind the current one. There’s a limit on what we can support. If we discover a simple fix, great, otherwise, best just use FF.
alright, if i’m alone with this problem and you’re up-to-date on the backend, so be it
We’ll see if any other problems arise. Sorry we can’t be of more help.
There is one font that works for Pali and Sanskrit on Windows XP, and that is “Microsoft Sans Serif,” but if I remember correctly, it has no real italic or bold italic. On Windows Vista and later, Microsoft shipped greatly expanded versions of Arial and Times New Roman that easily covered all the needed characters for Pali and Sanskrit. Not many people noticed this change, but it was a huge improvement over XP.
I didn’t know that browsers in the last 10 years did that old “empty box” thing. Certainly at least Microsoft Sans Serif supports those characters, so Chrome was not being very smart about font rendering.
it appears that Discourse still uses the old method of fonts delivery because the face looks the same and here i don’t have this display problem
That’s right, the new system is only for the main site, due to the vast range of languages to be supported. For here we have merely renamed the fonts, you shouldn’t see any difference.