Solution on how to show hieroglyphs and other unicode characters in Vivaldi

Kanrei

I had the problem, that hieroglyphs were not showing in Vivaldi, despite having them on my Mac and them working fine in Safari and Firefox.

I found the solution then with installing the Noto font for Egyptian hieroglyphs on my computer https://www.google.com/get/noto/ . This solved the problem that hieroglyphs couldn't be shown.
I tried it also out with other scripts. However it seems not all scripts are available. (But maybe one could try finding other fonts supporting those scripts.)

I thought I post it here, since I didn't find right away a solution to the problem when googling. Maybe this can help someone else too.

Pesala

@Kanrei I consider it to be bad website design. If they use a script that is not web-safe, they should embed a suitable font in the webpage.

ryofurue

@Kanrei said in Solution on how to show hieroglyphs and other unicode characters in Vivaldi:

I had the problem, that hieroglyphs were not showing in Vivaldi, despite having them on my Mac and them working fine in Safari and Firefox.

Would you post an example of such a page? What other unicode characters aren't shown?

For example, the following webpage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_(Unicode_block)

shows correct hieroglyphic characters on my Vivaldi . They are not images but proper glyphs of a font. (You can copy those characters and paste onto, for example, the command line of the terminal. Or, I can copy it even here! → 𓀀𓀁

macOS 10.15.5 . I don't think I've ever installed any fonts to this machine of mine. I mean, all these fonts are included in macOS .

ryofurue

@Pesala said in Solution on how to show hieroglyphs and other unicode characters in Vivaldi:

I consider it to be bad website design. If they use a script that is not web-safe,

That's a misunderstanding. The original poster (Kanrei) is talking about unicode characters.

Exactly the same thing can be said about Chinese characters, for example. You can freely use them anywhere like this: 漢字 .

If your operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux) has corresponding fonts installed, your browser should be able to display those characters.

Conversely, if those characters are not displayed, either your OS doesn't have the fonts or your browser is somehow unable to use the installed fonts. You don't blame the designer of the website for using non-web-safe characters. Unicode characters are web-safe.

Pesala

@ryofurue said in Solution on how to show hieroglyphs and other unicode characters in Vivaldi:

You don't blame the designer of the website for using non-web-safe characters. Unicode characters are web-safe.

It is safe to assume that users will have a Chinese font installed, it is not safe to assume that they will have a font installed that uses hieroglyphics.

Web-safe Fonts

A Former User

@Pesala @ryofurue @Gwen-Dragon For those who didn’t notice this, the OP say they solved the problem and want to help others (i.e. increase the number of relevant search results for this issue and the number of irrelevant results for all other issues).

Kanrei

@ryofurue
I wasn't exactly on this page, but was also on Wikipedia and got just squares. I had hieroglyphs on Mac too, and it was no problem in Firefox or Safari.
But yeah installing this different font helped. I don't know why exactly Vivaldi and Chrome had trouble taking the fonts which are on Mac.

Yeah I added the info for general unicode, because it worked also with other scripts than hieroglyphs. Sure common scripts as Chinese weren't a problem. But thee's other rarer scripts, which might not work either.

@potmeklecbohdan ^^ Yes exactly, I posted it here, because when I searched for the issue I didn't find any infos, but since I found then a solution I wanted to share it, so others will hopefully find it, when having the same issue.

AltCode

Here is a list of all the fonts that come with macOS Catalina: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210192

If you look at that list, Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs is not actually installed, but it is available if an app requests it by name or if a document is already using them.

From this I think its fair to assume that Safari (and Firefox) are requesting the font when needed, but do not actually have it installed, and for some reason, neither Vivaldi nor Chrome do this.

ryofurue

@Gwen-Dragon said in Solution on how to show hieroglyphs and other unicode characters in Vivaldi:

//EDIT: I know that Vivaldi 3.0 Stable had a issue not displaying some (bangladeshian) unicode glyphs in a correct way. For me it seemed Vivaldi used a wrong substitution font. That issue vanished with 3.1 Snapshot.

I guess this is the answer to the mystery why @Kanrei didn't see the glyphs while I did.

Or perhaps I've forgotten installing Noto fonts.

ryofurue

@Pesala said in Solution on how to show hieroglyphs and other unicode characters in Vivaldi:

@ryofurue said in Solution on how to show hieroglyphs and other unicode characters in Vivaldi:

You don't blame the designer of the website for using non-web-safe characters. Unicode characters are web-safe.

It is safe to assume that users will have a Chinese font installed, it is not safe to assume that they will have a font installed that uses hieroglyphics.

That is correct, but I stand by my main message: Don't blame the web designer for using an obscure character set as long as it is in unicode.

Old world: Web designers didn't know what character sets were available to the user. So they had to be conservative. That's the idea behind the notion of "web-safe" in the first place.

New world: Web designers use any character sets as long as they are in unicode. It's up to the user to download and install missing fonts. Or it's up to the OS to make this process automatic.

Unicode is designed to move from the old world to the new world and Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, etc. has made efforts to help the transition. And the transition is now nearly complete.

As @AltCode noted, almost all fonts are automatically displayed usually without user intervention nowadays. The problem OP experienced is one of the glitches of this not-yet-100%-complete system.

So, instead of blaming the web-designer, we should try to iron out these glitches. That's the way to move forward.

nomadic

@ryofurue The thing that @Pesala is talking about does happen a lot. It might not be the case in this instance because it is Unicode characters rather than a font issue, but with fonts, it is a common mistake among novice web designers and graphic artists.

They install some exotic font on their computer and then proceed to make their design while only testing it on their system. It will always look right to them because they have the font installed, but when they publish the site or send off an SVG file, the user/recipient will not have the correct font and the design will break.

This is solved in web design by only using web fonts or including an import for the font in the CSS, and in graphic design, text is often converted to a path to make the font irrelevant.

I made this mistake with some SVG logos I made for a friend. Learned my lesson. Now when using Inkscape, I always use Path → Object to Path on text when I am done editing it.

Pesala

@ryofurue You are assuming that everyone is using a modern OS. Web designers who want to maximise their audience need to cater for those on older systems.

It is a simple thing to embed a suitable font on academic sites when a significant minority of users are not using the latest OS.

I have been embedding fonts on my sites for years, because I use Latin Extended Additional characters for Pāḷi and Sanskrit. Before I learnt about font embedding, I at least provided a font to download on my site.