Greek text IE8 issue with CSS text-transform

Question

Have a site with Greek text, in it I have this div which i have applied the style text-transform:uppercase.

<div class="greek" style="text-transform:uppercase;">Υπηρεσίες</div>

Lower case: Υπηρεσίες

Transformed to upper case: ΥΠΗΡΕΣΊΕΣ

So wat it does in IE8 is it shows the text in uppercase except for one letter "ς"

so on IE8 it display it like: ΥΠΗΡΕΣΊΕς

Well this works fine on all browsers (FF, Chrome, IE9, IE10, IE11) but not in IE8.

Well it transforms the "σ" to "Σ" but doesnot transform the "ς"

Does some one have any CSS solution for this one.?

Answer 1

This is a bug/deficiency in the browser. By the specifications, text-transform must apply Unicode case mapping rules, which include mapping the final small sigma “ς” to uppercase sigma “Σ”. (They should also do uppercase to lowercase mapping in a manner that maps word-final “Σ” to “ς”, but that’s a different issue, and more complicated.) But some browsers still fail to do that.

There is nothing in CSS you can do about this. Client-side, what you could do is to have JavaScript code that fixes this by doing the conversion in content. But it is much better to do it server-side. Either write the content in all uppercase if you want it shown that way, or (if it comes from an external source), do the mapping using whatever server-side tools you are using.

Note that when you try to uppercase Greek text with CSS, you have other problems too. As the screen shot shows, the small iota with tonos “ί” has been transformed to capital iota with tonos “Ί”. This is not correct by Greek rules when uppercasing a word; the tonos (acute accent) should be omitted. Most browsers don’t do this right (Firefox does).