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I was looking at this site which uses accented russian characters. If you look at the page's source, you'll notice that they are using the character Џ to represent у and importing a special font to (presumably) redefine that character to be an accented у. Which made me wonder - is there a standard way to do this in 2015 that doesn't involve sending a special font across the wire?

xavier
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  • It is not that special, U+040F, well supported by many fonts on my machine. It is embedded font (russian.dmll.cornell.edu/fonts/ARS55FT.ttf) that messes it up. – Hans Passant Mar 27 '15 at 10:55

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Repurposing an existing character to render as some other glyph is generally a bad thing. It will confuse any agent that doesn't process the content visually (eg speech browsers, search engines, browser ‘find’ features etc).

If you really have to do the custom embedded font thing, use a character out of the Private Use Area (U+E000–U+F8FF). It is arguable whether this is really better than just including an image (or SVG) though.

There was no real need to use a custom font for the linked page in any case, they could have used standard combining diacriticals. eg. U+0423 Cyrillic Capital U with U+0301 Combining Acute Accent: У́, not really that exotic.

bobince
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