Talk:D`mt
Orthographic Mystery?
[edit](or just the chaos that emerges out of rendering vagaries deep in the genes of markup languages, browsers, encoding schemes, fonts and universal digipedias?)
[edit]Hi...
The tiny little page D`mt redirects to the almost as tiny Dʿmt. The only difference between the "old" "D`mt" page and the "new" "Dʿmt" page that has now replaced it is in which character entity(ies)are used to represent the symbol between "D" and "mt".
Page encoding for both pages is UTF-8. In the first instance, the character used is "%60", the same one used in the article text when spelling out the word.
... 
Note that in the right hand image the "bad character" box appears in bold versions of "D`mt" in both the title and the body text's first line, but in the twelfth word of the third line of the text it displays properly...
The title of the "referred to" page is spelled using the characters "%CA" and "%BF" in sequence.
The reason this came to my attention is that on my machine (Firefox 1.5, WinXP SP2) even when the page is properly recognized as being UTF-8 the "%CA%BF" sequence is represented not by any recognizable mark but as the "empty box" commonly used to indicate illegitimate characters.
Obviously the two characters are meant to work together to create a third, but according to all my resources "%CA" is , while "%BF" is; i could not find a reference for the two of them acting upon each other. My references define "%CA" as "uppercase E circumflex", while "%BF" is defined as "inverted question mark".
Meanwhile, the character specified in the page that is referring away from itself, "%60" ("spacing grave accent" or "back apostrophe") shows up like it is supposed to, and as it does in the text (but not the title) of the referred-to page.
What I don't understand is why the article with the legible title (using "%60") has been replaced by the article with the illegible title (using "%CA%BF"), which article meanwhile continues to use "%60" when spelling the title word in the body of its text?
Continued searching (meaning I looked in the page's history where I should have looked in the first place) uncovered the reason why the change was made...
...but even on the history page the "new and improved and linguistically correct" character just shows up as a box, which does not strike me as the clarification the author of the change so obviously intended...
Anyone with more Wiki experience than I have want to help me understand this, including understanding if anything should be done about it, and, if so, whether a novie like myself should be the one to tackle it?
Thanks --starfarmer 14:05, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
P.S. A late night additional thought...could this phenomena be by any chance a result of the page title display font being specified by the Cologne Blue skin (which I've used for years now without ever considering that I might actually be missing something as a result!)?
P.P.S. And if it is, and if it is likely to impact other page titles in the Wiki universe for those using the Cologne Blue skin, would it make sense to make a universal change to that skin's code? --starfarmer
Never Mind
[edit]The more I thought about the more I tossed and turned. Ultimately I realized the problem just had to be in my machine, in the way it was interpreting things. I kept Googling until I stumbled on the page so understatedly entitled Display Problems? over at unicode.org. I also found the local Special Characters page in Editing Help...together, they gave me the info I needed to solve the problem, even if I did so in a rather scattershot manner.
My solution? Round up every Unicode font--truetype, opentype or postscript--that lived in the darkness of the ginormous font collection I've accrued since adolescence. I found twenty. I installed twenty. Problem solved.
Which one of the twenty fonts is providing me with my "ayin" (or was that an "alif")? Couldn't tell you. But I decided I'd obsessed enough over this and it was time to switch over to an "accept the miraculous and move on" mode ("Oooh, look what a pretty sunset Jesus made for us today!")
If anyone has read this sequence of postings, I can only hope they found some amusement in them. Otherwise, I apologize for the wasted zeroes (but not the ones). --starfarmer 14:40, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks again for bearing with me as I continue to plumb the ever-deepening depths of this mystery religion lightheartedly dubbed Wikipedia! --starfarmer
- That was me who made the change it was intended for correctness, but I didn't know that it would show up as a box on other user's systems (it shows up fine on mine). Another user pointed this out, but I didn't do anything yet. I think perhaps the best thing to do is to use the spiritus asper on which the Ayin symbol is based instead so that the character shows up for everyone. Does Dʽmt show up fine for you? — ዮም | (Yom) | Talk • contribs • Ethiopia 20:15, 25 August 2006 (UTC)