Internet Explorer and Unicode

Internet Explorer has some problems when it comes to displaying polytonic Greek Unicode text. Below are two samples of the first sentence of Xenophon's Anabasis. In the first sample, we do not provide any font hints. In the second sample we specify (in the web page's style sheet) that any of Palatino Linotype, Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Grande, or Gentium can be used.

Unicode without Font Hints

Δαρείου καὶ Παρυσάτιδος γίγνονται παῖδες δύο, πρεσβύτερος μὲν Ἀρταξέρξης, νεώτερος δὲ Κῦρος: ἐπεὶ δὲ ἠσθένει Δαρεῖος καὶ ὑπώπτευε τελευτὴν τοῦ βίου, ἐβούλετο τὼ παῖδε ἀμφοτέρω παρεῖναι. ὁ μὲν οὖν πρεσβύτερος παρὼν ἐτύγχανε: Κῦρον δὲ μεταπέμπεται ἀπὸ τῆς ἀρχῆς ἧς αὐτὸν σατράπην ἐποίησε, καὶ στρατηγὸν δὲ αὐτὸν ἀπέδειξε πάντων ὅσοι ἐς Καστωλοῦπεδίον ἁθροίζονται.

Unicode with Font Hints

Using Internet Explorer (versions 6, 5.5, or 5.01) and assuming you have one of the fonts listed above, you will see little square boxes instead of accented vowels in the first sample, and proper polytonic Greek in the second sample.

Using Firefox on Windows, both samples will appear just fine. Likewise for Opera, Mozilla, recent versions of Netscape, Safari and other modern browsers.

If you can see both samples clearly, your browser can read any sort of polytonic Greek Unicode found on the net, including web-based email services such as Yahoo or Gmail. You are golden.

Configuring Explorer to display polytonic Greek

To coax Explorer into displaying both samples without any square boxes, you must configure it to use one specific Unicode font for all websites.

Go to the Tools menu and select Internet Options. Click the Fonts button at the bottom of the panel. For the box labeled “Language script”, select “Latin based”. Then for “Web page font” select a Unicode font that supports polytonic Greek. Leave the box labeled “Plain text font” alone. Click OK.

Now, while still in the Internet Options panel, click the Accessibility button at the bottom. Check the box “Ignore font styles specified on Web pages” and click OK. Finally click OK to exit the Internet Options panel. You should now see both samples displaying without any boxes.

The only downside of this approach is that you are now overriding the fonts specified by all web pages, not just those that display polytonic Greek. You may not like the look of some of the sites. However by switching into and out of the Accessibility mode, you can read any polytonic Greek as well as do your normal browsing.

Internet Explorer can handle other sorts of Unicode text without the Accessibility hack. My speculation is that Explorer understands ranges of Unicode characters and doesn't expect the discontinuous range of characters used to implement polytonic Greek (modern Greek letters in one range, accented vowels in another).