Web browser testing for Unicode Hebrew and CSS @font-face: BIDI, Positioning, and Diacritical Mark Support

Default Browser Character Encoding and BIDI (bi-directional) Text

This test uses iframes to display plaintext Hebrew that will only appear legible if your browser displays the text as Unicode (UTF-8). If your browser's default character encoding is set as ANSI ISO-8559-1 or some other encoding, then the text below may appear illegible. Additionally, if your browser does not support bi-drectional text (BIDI), the Hebrew will be displayed backward in the test. Browsers failing BIDI and unicode are listed in the test results.

In the following iframe, there is no Content-Type header informing the browser to display the Hebrew pangram below as UTF-8 encoded text. There is also no hidden UTF-8 BOM (Byte Order Mark) in the text file to provide your browser with any hint to display the text as UTF-8. If the following looks like gibberish, check your browser's display/content settings and change the default character encoding to Unicode (UTF-8). If you cannot change this setting, then your browser may not be able to recognize and display Unicode text.

Compare the above with the following text in which the Content-Type is declared as plaintext UTF-8 via an .htaccess file, thus telling the browser to display the text as UTF-8. (The text file also contains no UTF-8 Byte Order Mark.)

The .htaccess file simply tells the web server to serve the txt file in the iframe as UTF-8 plaintext:

<Files "pangram-utf8.txt">
ForceType 'text/plain; charset=UTF-8'
</Files>

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Hebrew font Browser Test version 0.70 by Aharon Varady for The Open Siddur Project (November 2011).

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