Hebrew diacritics and Latin script combination support on Chrome for windows

Question

I am currently coding a website where the designer has decided to combine Hebrew diacritics on a Latin script. such as the example below:

ayֶelֶet

This kind of combination renders properly (i.e. the diacritics are below the Latin letter e in both instances) on all windows browsers except for chrome. The funny thing is, that while it doesn't render properly on chrome for windows, it does on chrome for android, chrome for linux (debian) and chrome for MacOS. I tried the following two different markups, but to no avail:

<h1>ayֶelֶet</h1>

and:

<h1>ay&#1462;el&#1462;et</h1>

Does anyone have a solution or a workaround? I would love to just let it go, but since chrome for windows has such a large user share, I can't just ignore this. Also since I'm a bit of a standards geek, I'd really rather avoid using a .png instead of raw text.

Thanks a million, Itamar.

Answer 1

I’m afraid Chrome for Windows has a bug in dealing with diacritic marks. It basically does not seem to treat U+05B6 HEBREW POINT SEGOL (or other Hebrew diacritics) as a nonspacing mark when it follows a Latin letter.

Note that the rendering is not correct on other browsers either – the segol is slightly misplaced (away from the horizontal middle of “e”) –, and the reason why it looks like acceptable is a result of two errors accidentally almost canceling out each other. In Unicode, a combining diacritic mark is written after the base character, not before it. On the other hand, IE and Firefox seem to handle the segol so that it is placed below the letter that follows it. This is presumably caused by directionality.

In general, browsers are still rather poor in rendering combining diacritic marks, except when used in usual contexts – and using Hebrew diacritics on Latin letters is rather unusual (even though it is valid by Unicode principles, which allow any diacritic to be combined with any letter, but there is no guarantee of what the result will look like).