diacritics

[Andrew Glass]

Yes, indeed, I didn't spot that at first, now I understand the problem.

The fonts are not at fault here, the page is incorrectly encoded. The author of the page has used combining diacritics to render the underdots. This is perhaps a good way to proceed considering that one of the major serif fonts does not include s and t with dot below. However, combining diacritics need to be entered after the character they are to be placed below and not before. In the present example the encoding is:

A{U+0323}s{U+0323}t{U+0101}dhy{U+0101}y{U+012B}

U+0323 = COMBINING DOT BELOW
U+0101 = LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH MACRON
U+012B = LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH MACRON

If the placement of the combining dot below were switched to follow the characters in question, all would be well:

As{U+0323}t{U+0323}{U+0101}dhy{U+0101}y{U+012B}

or one could encode with precomposed forms:

A{U+1E63}{U+1E6D}{U+0101}dhy{U+0101}y{U+012B}

U+1E63 = LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH DOT BELOW
U+1E6D = LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH DOT BELOW

Indeed, it seems that Firefox is not as capable as IE when it comes to rendering Devanagari on Windows 98. Not sure what the solution to that would be. But presumably everyone who has Windows 98 and Firefox, also has IE.

Best wishes,

Andrew