I mentioned a few weeks ago that I wanted to know if there was an
emerging standard font for Romanized Pali. The answer definitely
seems to be no! My context was that I wanted to make an HTML page
that would be accessible to as many people as possible, and
preferably many of them would not have to download any special font.
I don't think I ever mentioned the solution I adopted in the end. It
was this:
- use Unicode, not a proprietary encoding system
- Arial Unicode MS is good, but only people who have bought
Microsoft Office will have it
- Gentium and TITUS Cyberbit Basic are both good, and as far as I
know are freely available, at least for non-commercial use. Also, I
believe there is a MAC version of Gentium.
- Tahoma comes with Microsoft Windows XP and has all the characters
we need. However, older version of Tahoma, which many people will
still have on their computers, do *not* have all the required
characters. Therefore I put Tahoma *last* on my list, so that people
could solve the problem of missing characters if necessary by
downloading one of the free fonts mentioned above.
To get this to work, my page about Pali includes the HTML:
FONT face="Arial Unicode MS, Gentium, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, Tahoma"
Hopefully this allows me to reach as wide an audience as possible,
and in many cases there will be no need to download a special font
to view the page.