I'm happy to be wrong on this topic! -----Original Message----- From: barryleiba@gmail.com [mailto:barryleiba@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Barry Leiba Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2017 10:41 AM To: John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> Cc: Mark Svancarek <marksv@microsoft.com>; John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com>; Don Hollander <don.hollander@icann.org>; Joseph Yee <jyee@afilias.info>; HEALTH Yao <yaojk@cnnic.cn>; ua-eai@icann.org Subject: Re: [Ext] EAI Working group Archives
If the fonts aren't installed, you may see boxes. That's system-specific and user-specific and app-specific. I agree with you that it's pretty weak circa 2017. You may be right that boxes have been completely eliminated at this point, but I am not sure sure.
At some point, you just lose. If I send you Arabic text and you don't have an Arabic font, unless you plan to do something heroic like send it to a faraway rendering service that returns a png image, what are you going to do?
Of course. But the main point is that most modern systems are able to display a good deal of the commonly used scripts without extra downloads. My iPad, configured for dead-standard English, can still display Wiki pages in Russian and Greek and Hebrew and Arabic and Chinese and Japanese and Korean and.... If I want a nicer Chinese font, I can deal with that myself, but the basic support is there and I don't see boxes. I even get Mongolian and Thai. b