One of the most annoying looks of Ethiopian websites that
further degrades our amateur graphics into a low … low level of child’s
scrapbook is the fonts. Most, if not more than 95% of all Ethiopian websites
with geez literal content, does not work if the user does not have a Unicode
font installed on their client computers. What is even worse is that, it is
very misleading to the web developers as they try to test the appearance of
their WebPages on their computers.“Looks pristine and nice” on their windows 7 operating system, chrome 10 browser and power geez Unicode installed. Little do they know that their website is a whole page full of squares when viewed in different platforms with no geez font installed. Well I don’t have to hammer it in any more J
Lucky for us, this is not only
our problem. Any language literal that is not English shares our fate. So
developer communities throughout the world came up with a neat solution which
is to install fonts on demand and went further ahead to create very simple free
open source tool for us to use. http://www.fontsquirrel.com/
provides exclusive tools to generate what they call “@font-face” kits for any
font that is not available on the client computer. So in simplest terms, you
can use any of your favorite geez fonts to generate the appropriate files (CSS
and font files compatible with different browsers).
Even with this implementation,
couple of issues worth mentioning here are
- Size of
the font files : this will effectively drive the size of the web page by a
little more than 150 kb depending on the user’s browser
- Geez/English
mixed content : Latin fonts shipped with geez fonts does not look
professional
jGeez to the rescue
With the introduction of jGeez1.1.0.0, I have included a feature where users with geez font already installed
are rewarded with faster web experience. This new feature evaluates client
browser’s ability to correctly render geez literals before attempting to download
these font files (if you are interested on how this isachieved please click here to visit my blog about that). So if the user
already have a geez Unicode installed on his/her computer then your page will not
download the fonts instead will use the geez font already on user’s computer.
But if there is not geez Unicode found, jGeez will grab the appropriate font
from jGeez CDN (public shared location).
Add these two lines in the header
section of your html mark up and your are done
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.jgeez.com/cdn/jquery.jgeez.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.jgeez.com/cdn/jquery.jgeez.min.js"></script>
Please refer to jGeez developer’sguide found here and downloads page to fully understand how to quickly to add
the full force of jGeez awesomeness J
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