Chinese fonts / Noto Sans S Chinese Regular

[gwpriester]

This is a little late but you can group text and an object/bitmap etc. using a Soft Group. The text remains editable and does not get converted to a bitmap.

Also, when text grouped with a graphic is published, the text is added to a Alt tag in the HTML document. I just tried this using your text from the previous post and the Alt tag includes all the text.

So text exported as a bitmap cannot be edited in the manner of Soft Grouped text, but it can be found by search engines.

[blueznl]

Hmmm. Small addition: fonts are actually uploaded and downloaded, but browsers seem to have their own idea how to provide alternatives...

Here's how I tested: I created a little page and added three special fonts Banco, Lower Westside and Excocet. They're all TTF files.

They are included with a website when I upload the page (the TTF files are inside the output files). When loading the webpage in Firefox on Linux Mint these custom fonts are clearly shown. I know these three are definitely not default Linux fonts, so at least web fonts do load OTF fonts are NOT exported / uploaded.

Note: Sim Hei and Sim Sun are pretty much 'websafe' fonts (they seem to be the most common fonts for webpages in China, and every browser seems to have adequate replacement fonts on board. As such, it wouldn't be necessary to embed these two as webfonts.

Now comes the interesting part:

Firefox on Linux Mint recognized Noto Sans, Open Sans, and Droid Sans Fallback. Funny enough it did not recognize Noto Sans CJK nor Noto Sans S. However it did download and use the three special fonts Banco, Lower Westside and Excocet. Point proven: Xara uploads the files, and they were downloaded and used. Droid Sans, although uploaded, wasn't used. I've checked the xr_fonts.css file and everything seems to be allright.

Then I tried Chrome and Firefox on a Windows machine to verify my findings. Firefox messed up Droid Sans Fallback (it seems it doesn't download it, perhaps there's a file size issue?) whilst IE also messed up Exocet.

After some more testing I can only reach this conclusion:

- non-latin charsets: don't use webfonts unless absolutely necessary
- stick to websafe fonts unless the webfont is smallish
- turn special fonts into graphics (unless there's too much text)

Technology still needs to go a little further

[iannicholson]

I am experiencing the same problem, although I'm finding that IE and Chrome handle things better than Firefox.

I have found if you edit your Xara website in a font that can be displayed, then change it to, say Arial, then while the characters do NOT appear in Xara, they do appear in the browser once the website is uploaded.

If Xara could properly display double-byte character sets for the all the safe fonts, it would solve the problem!