Re: Determining if Unicode / appropriate glyphs installed on client

Hi

On Tue 09-Jul-2002 at 12:37:25 -0500, Mustafa Ali (UrduWord.com) wrote:
> 
> Is there an efficient method to determine if a certain multilingual content
> will display correctly on a browser (considering localized text encoding,
> language font repository, and text-processing algorithms), regardless of the
> user's accept-language preferences? 

Not as far as I'm aware :-(

> For example, using Arial Unicode MS and IE6, I can easily read
> websites in Arabic, Japanese, and most other languages. 

Mozilla in Linux is getting good as well, everything on these two pages
is rendered fine:

  http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html
  http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/utf8.html

The second site above includes some Urdu. The languages that I have
found to be hardest are ones like Punjabi -- it _only_ works in Windows,
Linux and OSX support is not yet there.

A site I worked on with Punjabi and Gujarati needed a help page, because
even with windows there were problems:

  http://www.laptopchallenge.org.uk/help/

Its not practical to ask people with dial-up connections to download
Arial Unicode -- I ended up sending a copy to someone in India on a CD,
in the post, since they had so much trouble trying to download it.

Sorry, no easy answers... yet...

Chris

-- 
Chris Croome                               <chris@webarchitects.co.uk>
web design                             http://www.webarchitects.co.uk/ 
web content management                               http://mkdoc.com/   
everything else                               http://chris.croome.net/  

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2002 07:36:45 UTC