[Koha] Russian Language characters in public catalog

[Eric Phetteplace]

Hi all,

This is perhaps more of a general web design problem than a Koha-specific
one but I'm wondering if others have had trouble with accented Russian
characters displaying properly and what their solution was. Here's a search
of all our Russian language records
<https://library.cca.edu/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?advsearch=1&idx=kw&op=and&idx=kw&op=and&idx=kw&limit=ln%2Crtrn%3Arus&sort_by=relevance&do=Search>;
there's an accent that's a large, sweeping arch over multiple letters
(sorry, after some research I still don't know its name) which renders as
blank unicode boxes by fonts that do not support it, e.g. "M. Sarʹi︠a︡n" as
opposed to how it should look
<https://www.google.com/search?&q=M.+Sar%CA%B9i%EF%B8%A0a%EF%B8%A1n>.

The Arial font is so far the only one I've found that renders the accent
properly, though I assume there are others. Koha theme's NotoSans doesn't
and neither do any of our institutional brand fonts. Is there anywhere in
the public catalog display where the record language is shown? Preferably
as a class or other CSS hook, if I could just do
`#catalogue_detail_biblio.russian { font-family: arial }` that'd be the
perfect solution.

I've been considering how to handle this but nothing other than simply
switching the whole catalog's font to Arial seems great. I can add some
JavaScript to change the font on just select pages, but I'd have to tell
when affected records are appearing and also apply it to search results. I
could edit all the records to romanize them but would be laborious since I
don't think there's a way to do a bulk edit that catches every instance of
the accent. Plus, newly imported records will have the same problem and
I'll have to keep revisiting them.

Best,

ERIC PHETTEPLACE Systems Librarian (he/him)

ephetteplace at cca.edu | o 510.594.3660

5212 Broadway | Oakland, CA | 94618

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