{"id":4829,"date":"2011-09-21T19:30:03","date_gmt":"2011-09-21T11:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/?p=4829"},"modified":"2011-09-23T21:23:34","modified_gmt":"2011-09-23T13:23:34","slug":"google-web-fonts-and-hanyu-pinyin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2011\/google-web-fonts-and-hanyu-pinyin\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Web fonts and Hanyu Pinyin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in the last century, getting Web browsers to correctly display Pinyin was such a troublesome task that I remember once even employing GIFs of first- and third-tone letters to get those to look right. So there were a whole lotta IMG tags in my text. Sure, I put the necessary info in ALT tags (e.g., “alt=’a3′”), just in case. But, still, I shudder to recall having to resort to that particular hack.<\/p>\n

Things are better now, though still far from ideal. Something that promises to considerably improve the situation of website viewers not all having the same font you may wish to use is CSS3’s @font-face, which allows those creating Web pages to employ fonts that are provided online. Google is helping with this through its Google Web Fonts<\/a>. (Current count: 252 font families.) <\/p>\n

But is anything in Google’s collection capable of dealing with Hanyu Pinyin? Armed with a handy-dandy Pinyin pangram<\/a>, I had a look at what Google has made available. <\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, most of the 29 font families marked as offering the “Latin Extended” character set failed to handle the entire Hanyu Pinyin set. The ???<\/span> group is the most likely to be unsupported at present, with third-tone vowels also frequently missing. <\/p>\n

Here are the Google Web fonts that do<\/em> support Hanyu Pinyin with tone marks:
\nSerifs<\/strong><\/p>\n