Configuring Your Browser To Use Diacritic Fonts

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Configuring Your Browser To Use Diacritic Fonts

To insure that the diacritic characters throughout the THL site appear properly in your web-browser your system and browser need to be configured properly. THL uses Unicode encoding to display diacritics and your system and browser must be set up appropriately to handle the Unicode characters. To insure the proper display of diacritic characters within the THL, one needs to check the items listed below. Should this not work for some reason and you have installed Arial Unicode MS, you can view an alternate version of the diacritic chart.

Make sure you have a diacritic font with the full set of Indo-Tibetan diacritic characters installed in your font folder.

All recent versions of Microsoft Office are shipped with the Arial Unicode MS and the Microsoft Sans Serif fonts, both of which have all the necessary diacritics. We recommend using either of these fonts, or Gentium, for viewing the THL site. On the Mac, one can use "Lucida Grande". Below is a list of links to download the fonts that are available for free download. The others are copyrighted by Microsoft or a subsidiary corporation.

  • Download Gentium (PC and Mac)
  • Download Lucida Grande (Mac Only)

Make sure your browser is configured to display Unicode in the appropriate font.

Of course, the way to do this differs depending on the browser one uses. Here the process will be described for the two most common browsers: Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Internet Explorer

  1. From the Tools menu, choose Internet Options
  2. On the resultant popup frame, click the "Fonts" button
  3. Choose "Latin-based" for "Language script:"
  4. Choose "Arial Unicode MS" (or the desired font) for "Web page font:"
  5. Choose "Courier Ext" (or the desired font) for "Plain text font:"
  6. The result should look like this:
  7. Click "Ok" for both frames and refresh your browser screen.

Firefox

  1. From the Edit menu, choose Preferences
  2. Open up the Appearance option by clicking on the arrow.
  3. Under "Fonts for:" choose "Western"
  4. Set "Proportional:" to "Sans Serif"
  5. Set "Size (pixels):" to 14 or 16, depending on your preferences
  6. Set "Serif:" to "Times Ext Roman"
  7. Set "Sans Serif:" to "Arial Unicode MS"
  8. Set "Monospace:" to "Courier Ext"
  9. The result should look like this:
  10. Click on "Ok".

Provided for unrestricted use by the external link: Tibetan and Himalayan Library