Russian language font (cyrillic) not displaying correctly in Safari

Question

Level 1

8 points

Russian language font (cyrillic) not displaying correctly in Safari

I'm learning russian and found some great online sites. However, when I change my Safari default encoding preferences to "Cyrillic (Mac OS)" and the standard font to "Helvetica CY", the test website I'm using to determine if my settings are correct appears to display some characters incorrectly. For example, there's a character that looks like an "h" with a cross that I'm pretty sure is not in the cyrillic alphabet. Are my settings incorrect? Or is the site using an old encoding scheme that Safari can't read?

The russian language test site that does not display correctly for me is:

http://lexiconbridge.com/charset/mac.htm

Scroll to the bottom half of the page to see how Safari renders the russian fonts.

спасибо (Thanks!)

Mac Book Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.1), 2.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB SDRAM

Posted on Feb 3, 2008 2:21 PM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,252 points

Feb 3, 2008 7:38 PM in response to Athlete61

there's a character that looks like an "h" with a cross that I'm pretty sure is not in the cyrillic alphabet.

But it is: ћЋ U+045B and U+40B are used in Serbian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SerbianCyrillicalphabet

But I think that page is designed for a non-standard encoding anyway, "Academic Russian". You would need to download a special font to get correct results, and there is no guarantee such a font will work in Safari and other OS X apps because they are designed to use Unicode fonts, with other standard encodings being translated into that for display. If it doesn't work in Safari, sometimes you can make such custom fonts work in FireFox or Opera.

See this page for the special font needed and explanations about browsers:

http://russian.cornell.edu/fonts/brtfmacrusfonts.htm

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Answer 2

Athlete61 Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 7, 2008 5:53 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanks Tom. I didn't even consider the possibility of serbian (vs. russian). I guess I'll have to just wing it since the font from that site you recommended didn't work for me in Safari either. Oh well, there are other language sites I can go to. Thanks for the quick response.

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,252 points

Feb 8, 2008 6:19 AM in response to Athlete61

the font from that site you recommended didn't work for me in Safari either.

As suggested, you need to use Firefox. Set the font preference for User Defined to Accented Cyrillic. Works for me.

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