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Sunday, May 17, 2009

Diacritical Marks

A week ago I confessed that I couldn't figure out how to make an inverted breve appear below the letter u. Thanks to Pierre Wechter, who pointed me to http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0300.pdf, which showed me how.

The HTML incantation is <SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: Gentium Alt">&#x0075;&#x032f;</SPAN>, which yields . If this looks like u followed by a box on your browser, that's because
  • You don't have the Gentium Alt font installed on your computer. I downloaded the font for free from http://www.fontica.com/font/gentium_alt and unzipped it into the fonts folder on my computer.
  • You haven't instructed your web browser to render pages using the Gentium Alt font.
  • Even if you instructed your web browser to render pages using the Gentium Alt font, it doesn't follow your instructions properly. I find that Internet Explorer doesn't render the inverted breve below the letter u correctly, but Google Chrome does.