RE: [xml-dev] Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?

["Richard Ishida" <ishida@w3.org>]

> I once worked on a UK government web site that had to display text in
> Chinese, Urdu, Bengali, Welsh, and English. And I'm afraid the bad news was
> that the available fonts simply weren't up to it. Native speakers of these
> languages told us that the results were unreadable. We ended up using
> graphics. I would like to believe that that situation has changed (this was
> about 8 years ago), but I can't see any evidence for this.

Hello Michael,

Things have indeed moved on a great deal, though not everyone is using what's available. For example, there are free TrueType or OpenType fonts available for most scripts now (see[1] and [2]).  Combine those with a Unicode encoding and, in some cases, a suitable bit of rendering software at the OS level, and you're away.

As a small example, see http://rishida.net/articles/phrases (since you probably don't have the fonts for many of these examples, you may want to also look at the PDF version I just created: http://rishida.net/articles/phrases.pdf )

Many of these scripts are far and away more complicated than Welsh (for which, by the way, I recommend also the Gentium or Doulos SIL or Charis SIL free OpenType fonts.  The latter two are more advanced than the former for things like IPA.)  Note also that they are all on the same page, thanks to Unicode encoding.

Here, just as examples, are sites that make heavy use of Khmer [3] and Tibetan [4].  

HTH,

RI



[1] http://www.wazu.jp/index.html
[2] http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts_windows.html
[3] http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=km/download/keyboard
[4] http://www.thdl.org/index.php?lng=tib




============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
 
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/blog/
http://rishida.net/