Typophile

Wront characters in Armenian texts

Sevag B. Martouni

Today, through Firefox I changed the default font for displaying Armenian texts on the web from Mshtakan to Segoe UI (I have a Mac). So far there haven't been any problems with Armenian websites, however on facebook (see imege below) the lowercase letters |ր| and |դ| of Segoe UI are being replaced with the letters |ր| and |դ| from Verdana. Not that I mind it, but I'm very curious as to why is this happening. (On Typophile too, these letters are being replaced from Segoe UI to Verdana.)

Also, is there a way of changing the defult fonts for displaying Armenian through the Mac System on Snow leopard, as well as on the keyboard viewer. Thank you.

A curious issue, but these seem to work okay on Windows. How did you get these fonts on the Mac? Armenian is new to the Windows 8 versions of these fonts and I don't think we include them with any Microsoft Mac product.

Si

Got it through a PC running Windows 8.

I see... I "borrowed" the engine from my neighbors car and I wonder why when I hit 32 mph hour I hear a strange noise?

I understand what you mean and I'm being honest. This is the first time that this kind of an error has occurred with a font supporting Armenian. Thanks for your input.

Don't worry I "wront" tell anyone. ;-) Seriously, thanks for reporting the issue, we're taking a look to see if there's anything in the font that might be causing this or if it repro's on Windows.

Cheers, Si

I do apologize for the spelling and the word is ‘wrong’ not ‘wront’. Maybe the admins could fix it.

It looks to me like those two characters (U+0564/0580) are the only Armenian characters in Verdana. Why would someone do that?

So I suppose the site is set up to use Verdana by default and has to use some other font for all the other characters.....

PS I don't know of any way to change the default fonts used by OS X for Keyboard Viewer or elsewhere in the OS.

That makes sense, this not the Windows 8 version of Verdana. Earlier versions of Verdana only included the two Armenian characters required for the currency. Complete Armenian coverage drawn by Ruben Tarumian was added to the Windows 8 version.

@Si Thanks for the "currency" explanation. It seems that the latest version of OS X, 10.8.2, still comes with the older version of Verdana.

Captured from web.archive.org on 25 Feb 2015. view this capture