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I am having difficulty having geez texts like these

እቶም ዝቐለሉ ክፋል ናይቲ ቋንቋ እዮም፣ በዚ ኣብ ታሕቲ

to which you can find more information on wikipedia. Are not rendering at all on most mobile platforms.

I don't know what the causes are. I have declared the charset on my document as utf8
<meta charset="utf-8">

Is there some solution to showing these texts on mobiles like Nokia S60, or symbian phones running opera or their native browsers?

Jukka K. Korpela
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robue-a7119895
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  • For such old phone? If I remember well you MAY install more (TrueType) fonts on Symbian but it doesn't always work. FontRoute? Something like that... – Adriano Repetti Jul 22 '14 at 16:11
  • This is simply a font problem, probably nothing to do with encodings. Show the HTML and CSS code that you are using. As you have tagged the question with “webfonts”, you are apparently using downloadable fonts. Please identify the font(s) by specifying their origin and the methods used to generate the font files, in addition to the relevant CSS code. – Jukka K. Korpela Jul 22 '14 at 16:56
  • @JukkaK.Korpela I am not using any fonts. I just declared an html5 document and tried to show the above text inside the `

    ` tags.     – robue-a7119895 Jul 22 '14 at 17:00
  • So why the tag “webfonts” then? Anyway, if you don’t declare any fonts, the answer is rather trivial: computers that do not have any font installed that has glyphs for Ge’ez letters will not display such letters. – Jukka K. Korpela Jul 22 '14 at 17:03
  • @JukkaK.Korpela Sorry. That is where, the "I am a newbie" comes here. Because I am. Now, would you please inform me, where I can get these fonts for these Ge'ez alphabets ? – robue-a7119895 Jul 22 '14 at 19:16

1 Answers1

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This is a font problem, nothing to do with encodings. The issue is that only few fonts contain glyphs for Ge’ez letters, and many devices have no such font installed.

Thus, the only practical option is to use a font as a web font (downloadable font) with @font-face. For general instructions, see my Guide to using special characters in HTML.

The following fonts have Ge’ez letters: Code2000 (an extensive font, which appears to be abandonware), FreeSerif (seems to have all wrong spacing for Ge’ez letters), GNU unifont (a coarse bitmap font), Nyala (shipped with new versions of Windows), SunExt-A, and TITUS Cyberbit Basic. This leaves about two options, the last two; TITUS Cyberbit Basic is announced as free for non-commercial use, and SunExt-A is free. Both are rather large, so there will be problems on slow connections. Both look reasonable to me, but I don’t really know Ge’ez.

Jukka K. Korpela
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