The Online Critical Pseudepigrapha

One of the big problems with web publication of ancient texts has always been font support. If the user doesn't have the proper font, she won't see the proper Greek (or Hebrew, or Syriac) characters. She's left wondering why the site creators included empty boxes and other garbage characters in the text. This problem has been hugely eased by the advent of unicode fonts. Now, like with our familiar Latin characters, the characters for these other languages can be properly displayed by any font that includes the proper character set. No more mucking around with different encodings for different fonts. There's still a problem, though. Most operating systems still don't come by default with any fonts that include, e.g., the full set of pointed Hebrew characters. So even if my online text is encoded in unicode, users will still find scattered blanks or empty boxes in the text.

What is the solution to this dilemma? Enter font embedding. This recent technology allows us to embed fonts in a web-page, so that when they are needed the user's browser will automatically download them from the web-server as the page is rendered. In plain English, it means I can put the proper fonts on your computer temporarily so that you can see all of my text as it was meant to be seen. For academic purposes, this is a boon, since it removes the lingering uncertainty about whether the text I'm seeing is rendered properly.

This doesn't mean that there aren't still hazards. I spent a day-and-a-half this week trying to figure out why my embedded fonts weren't showing up properly on the OCP site. The problem was simple and easily missed. I had used the great web-font-kit tool at Font Squirrel (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator) to prepare my fonts for embedding here. Since web browsers don't all recognize the same font formats, you still have to include about five different versions of each font. Font Squirrel lets you upload your font files and converts them automatically to all of the necessary formats. You can then download them all in one neatly compressed package ready to be uploaded to your site. They even provide the necessary css (style) code snippets to add to your stylesheet. For those of us working in non-Latin characters, though, there's a snag that is easily missed. If you choose the "easy" setting on the Font Squirrel interface you will receive a nice download package with none of the characters for Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, or any other non-Latin script. Why? To reduce file-size, Font Squirrel "subsets" the uploaded fonts, stripping out any characters that it thinks you probably won't use--including the characters we need for our ancient texts! To get a working font-kit, then, you need to choose the "expert" option. You can leave most of the advanced settings alone. You just need to change "subsetting" to "No Subsetting". This tells the Font Squirrel tool "Don't take those unusual characters out, stupid, I need those!" If you're really brave and no what you're doing you can also choose "Custom Subsetting" and select the specific unicode character range you need. That results in smaller file sizes and marginally quicker page load speeds on your site.

The upshot is, that font embedding is now working on the OCP site, so you should see all of the proper characters even if you don't have the fonts installed on your own computer. If you run into any snags with font display, please file a bug report (click on the beetle in the toolbar at top) and let us know.