• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 16.02

Description:
I have noticed that the U+0361ligature diacritic needed for the transliteration of the Cyrillic characters are displaying incorrectly in Web OPAC.
Why does this not display correctly in the bold font in Internet Explorer?

Resolution:
This is a font problem.
Aleph Version 17 implements MARBI proposal 2004-8 which changes the encoding for the ligature character used in Romanization of Cyrillic.
However, the change which occurs automatically when records are converted from MARC-8 to UTF-8 (as during export from OCLC or RLIN) has revealed a flaw, a bug, in the construction of Arial Unicode MS. For some letter combinations (such as Cyrillic "ts" and "ia"), the ligature is displayed but too far to the left. For others the result is worse: you do not see the ligature, but the first letter of the ligated pair appears as some other character; to site the most common example, ts becomes us, with a grave accent on the u.

The two fonts, Arial Unicode MS and Bitstream Cyberbit fonts, seem not to be completely Unicode-compliant.

The possible solution is to change the Web font:
One font that does display the double diacritics correctly-that is, properly displayed when typed between two letters-is the TITUS Cyberbit Font (available at <http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/unicode/tituut.asp>)."

Another font that follows the Unicode specification of properly displaying the double tilde and ligature when typed between the letters is Gentium (available at http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium_download).