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International Language Applications with a gentle Unicode

Posted Date: 16 Oct 2007 Resource Type: Articles Category: .NET Framework

Posted By: Vasudevan Deepak Kumar Member Level: Diamond
Rating:

Points: 7

Introduction

Personalization of websites and conveying a message to the users in thier own personal language is always a greatest plus for any website. At least with respect to news papers and regional websites like horoscopes this has been an undebatable truth. Here we would venture on embarking on a new web standard towards this objective.

The Situation

From time immemorial, people actually used specific fonts to represent content in their languages. When they publish thier content on the worldwide web, the significant issue is that they ought to distribute the font file also.

There are some known disadvantages to this approach.

1) Browsers have a restriction to disallow and discourage font installations.
2) Fonts are binary files and hence susceptible to virus infections.
3) Installation of fonts are on a per system basis and people browsing your system from Airports have to download them wasting their precious rental times unnecessarily.
4) Installation of fonts need administrator access on the system. Shared systems like those in Airports may not have this privilege.
5) Search Engines may not be able to index pages built out of custom fonts.
6) Different web browsers might have different ways of font use. A subset of the browser world; Netscape and Internet Explorer itself has different ways of dynamic font usage.
7) Different Development Methodology: Internet Explorer comes with a rich tool like WEFT (www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft3/) which is totally different from Netscape's dynamic fonts whose tools are not free.

Elegant Unicode Solutions

The diversified font and related issues gave birth to Unicode. You can find out more info on Unicode over here (http://www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html). This has links to Unicode in your own language. Almost all the latest devices come with state-of-the-art Unicode support which is kind of standardized across. This does not necessitate any font downloads of any kind. Visiting Google Tamil in Internet Explorer or Mozilla FireFox does not give any visual difference or does not prompt any file download. Isn't it?

The Comprehensive Source

You can just get all the information on Unicode from this URL (http://www.unicode.org/).Also, Alan has a comprehensive link on Unicode settings for all major web browsers. Check out this link here (http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/browsers.html).

Tools:

Tamil:
As a quick starter, I would like to suggest a easy JavaScript Tamil Editor that uses Unicode to generate Tamil words here (http://aspspider.net/deepak/editor.html)
Freeware:
1) I would like to suggest a tool called Baraha which supports Unicode text generation for all Indian languages.

Summary

I hope this would be a quick and easy primer for anyone wishing to present content in the regional language of a web user in a more gentle way.

Responses

Author: varun 23 Sep 2008

Member Level: Gold Points : 2

Hi Vasudevan

Thanks for sharing the information.
Very useful article.

Varun

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