I am a teacher in Design Technology. Some of my documents, that have been created in Word, have special symbols. In particular gdt font, these characters will not show up on a canvas preview page. Can we get special fonts added to Canvas so we don't have this problem. I'm sure other courses might encounter the same thing at times for their courses.
It forces me to open the document to put up on the screen, instead of previewing it right on the overhead.
Hey Mike,
Not speaking for Instructure and only guessing on my own behalf, my guess is No because it would create an accessibility issue for other students who wouldn't have the special fonts added to their web browsers. Hoping more tech savvy people will back up or refute this guess.
Hi Mike,
I can back up Scott on that point. It would also cause significant extra fonts required to page loads, as there so many fonts available in the world, Canvas would need to provide for each one (which is generally why it keeps to a much smaller number).
You could print the documents to PDF and that would take care of it for you, then when you preview, the content should look spot on.
Hope that helps!
Stuart
I'm not Mike, but many programs run with a wide variety of
fonts available for use. It should not interfere with the Canvas
running, in fact it should add to the ability of the system to have
access to more. I get frustrated when I see we have a system
so complicated for some things, but so ignorant for something as
simple as access to read fonts on your documents. It causes the
instructor to waste time in downloading to a different program, just
to display to the students, when that is what the preview pane is
for in the canvas area.
Mark D. Mercer
Associate Faculty
Design Technology Dept.
Ivy Tech Community College
(Region 06 - East Central Indiana)
Changing Lives. Making Indiana Great.
(office) None
Hi Mark,
The difference with a web application over a regular desktop application is a desktop application has access to the hundreds (or more) fonts installed on your desktop. For a web application to function it either has to assume you have the font installed (which is bad, because, with specialised fonts, people often wont), or alternatively, load the font into the browser at runtime.
While doing so for a couple of fonts specifically for each site is OK, it would be impossible to load every font possible into Canvas and then have that load into peoples browsers. In theory you might think you could do so selectively, however, this would add a lot of complication and difficulty where Canvas would have to try to parse pages and files to find out what fonts they required.
I hope that clarifies for you.
Cheers,
Stuart
And my equal apologies Mark for the same mistake!
Accessibility really is a big problem here. I looked into the GD&T fonts from Verisurf and the Y14.5M-2009 font. They actually map regular characters to the special symbols. So while sighted people see the symbols (if the fonts were included), a screen reader would read nonsensical letters. The best way to avoid this is to use Unicode, but there is limited support. I wrote another post last week about this for someone.
A school can decide to load individual fonts with their custom global JavaScript on an account or subaccount level. That doesn't fix the accessibility issues, though.
Hey Mike,
Not speaking for Instructure and only guessing on my own behalf, my guess is No because it would create an accessibility issue for other students who wouldn't have the special fonts added to their web browsers. Hoping more tech savvy people will back up or refute this guess.