How to develop a website in language other than English?

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How to develop a website in language other than English?

Specifically, Gujrati, an Indian language.

shweta

6:29 am on Jul 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi,
i want to develop a website in gujrati.( Indian language )
how can i develop it? i mean if i use gujrati font and upload it to server,then will it work?

or it will require some software or any programming?

waiting for help...

thanks
-Shweta

bilalak

6:51 am on Jul 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hi
no I suggest you just rely on the browser to decode your font. If there is a special encoding for your language then use it or rely on the UTF-8 and design all your pages in unicode.

The browser does not download font files directly and it is a long process to do it with scripting.

regards

shweta

10:25 am on Jul 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi,
i go through the following site....

[alanwood.net...]

and make the above changes in Fontpage 2000.

but is it sufficient? because right now i dont have any server to check out.

what else i need to do?

thanks
-Shweta

bilalak

10:33 am on Jul 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

Now you need nothing else to test.
You can just type some text and then click on the browser icon in Front Page.
Then you would see the page on your own browser. It is better to let someone else to test the page for you because your browser migth find some fonts on your computer. Let someone with a native browser test the pages for you

Luck

BlobFisk

10:52 am on Jul 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

Don't forget to specify the language used on the page in the html tag:

This is quite important from an accessibility standpoint.

shweta

5:37 am on Jul 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi,
i m using Saumil_guj2 font for developing gujrati website. i did all the things as suggested by that url. I also include <html lang="[Gujrati]"> in the frontpage.
but when i test this from another comp (which is not having the above font) browser is showing text in english and not in gujrati.

what else i need to do?

waiting for ur help

thanks
-Shweta

g1smd

8:07 pm on Jul 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

Ensure that your document has a DOCTYPE at the beginning:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>

Ensure that the <head> section includes the Character encoding for the page:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

Choose the appropriate type for the page, it will not be ISO-8859-1 but some other.

tschild

10:09 pm on Jul 13, 2003 (gmt 0)

You should also check the HTTP headers that your server outputs before the HTML page - the headers should not specify a charset that contradicts the charset specification in the meta tag that g1smd referred to.

shweta

6:18 am on Jul 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi all,
I have included the Doctype at the begining. But right now i dont have any server to upload
my frontpage. So i can't check http headers. Before uploading i need to check that its working well.

For testing purpose i always delete the Saumil_guj2 font from control panel. and then i'll
check in which language browser produces the text?

but is it correct method for testing?

I did the following things in frontpage after writing some text in gujrati (Indian Language)

1. Install Saumil_guj2 font in control panel

2. In the Page Options Dialog Box i select Multilingual(UTF- 8) from Language (character set)
then i select Lucida Console from Default proportional
font
then i select Arial Unicode Ms from Deafult Fixed width
font.

3. In the Page properties dialog box i click on language tab
and select gujrati from page language.
then select Multilingual[UTF-8] from save the document as

4. Then i included the following doctype at the begining

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01
Transitional//EN">

5. Then i included language in html tag like this :
<html lang="[gu]">

6. Then i included the following in the head

...thats it!

thanks
waiting...

-Shweta

jaski

8:01 am on Jul 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hi Shweta,

This is a very interesting question and I have been looking for similar stuff myself. Here is what I have found so far .. of course every thing I write is IMHO and every thing may not be correct. It would be great if experts around here comment.

Your audience will have to have the *same* font that you use, installed in *their* computer to be able to read your webpages.

Usually this is the biggest problem for doing development in languages that do not use Roman characters.

That leaves some hard choices with their own limitations.

Simplest option is
True Type Fonts

Develop the site with a font you want. Then on the site give a link for downloading that font. You will also need to give instructions on how to install that font because users are usually not that savvy.

This also does not address the issue of Mac users. Mac users can be covered if you have an OpenType Font available for your language. OpenType [adobe.com] fonts are supposed to work on both windows and Mac.

This method has some obvious limitations. Those who do not have the font .. and do not want to go through the process of downloading and installing the font will not be able to use the site.

Another option is
Dynamic Fonts
These are fonts that can be embedded in the webpages and therefore do not need to be downloaded separately by the users. This can be a better option if you can find a dynamic font.

Dynamic fonts are not so readily available .. and you may need to create them. These can be created from true type fonts. There are two types of dynamic fonts
EOT - That works only on IE4 and above
PFR - That works on IE4 and above, and Netscape(4,5), Netscape6,7 do not support it.

EOT fonts are created using WEFT Microsoft WEFT [microsoft.com]. It creates a dynamic font file with .eot extension.

PFR is bit more difficult to create, though I have never done that myself.

You can read more about indian dynamic fonts from CDAC India website CDAC [cdacindia.com]

However note that you cannot simply lift ;) a dynamic font file from another site .. because these ususally have domain name hardcoded in them and do not work from another server.

Also any thing other than IE and/or Netscape will not be able to see. So its bad alternative from usability perspective.

Unicode Option
This is the latest (but probably not the greatest as of now) option. The biggest problem with these is that they are available only on Windows XP. Others still need to download unicode fonts file...and it seems its a huge 13mb file that downloads from microsoft with all the unicode characters stuffed in.

I am really not in a position to say which method is best as of now but may be this debate helps towards that.

Then there are issues like

1) How encodings work and what happens if your site uses forms.
2) Indian fonts some times even have different keyboard mappings for different fonts .. that means that some thing typed in one font will look like total rubbish when viewed using another font of the same language.

BlobFisk

9:04 am on Jul 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

5. Then i included language in html tag like this :
<html lang="[gu]">

No need for the square brackets - my mistake for any confusion caused by my using them:

shweta

10:11 am on Jul 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

Is there any need to make changes in
<font face="Saumil_guj2" size="6"> ?

Is there any need to write gujrati text within <span> tag?

is there any need to use something like<p class="" lang="" dir="">

but what should i write in dir?

i have tried both. but didn't work...

help please...

thanks
-Shweta

shweta

6:44 am on Jul 15, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi,
I did all the changes in frontpage. but how can i test it?
coz i don't have any server to taste.
can i taste it on Personal web server?

or what else?

waiting.........

thanks
-Shweta

bilalak

6:54 am on Jul 15, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hi
Just save the file as html file and test it locally without the need for any server

shweta

7:05 am on Jul 15, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi,
ya..its showing me gujarati text on my pc.
coz i have that font installed on my pc.
but will it work when i upload it to server?

waiting
thanks
-Shweta

g1smd

6:21 pm on Jul 15, 2003 (gmt 0)

It will work for most people that it needs to. I would expect that most of your target audience already have the appropraite fonts installed.

dragonlady7

7:31 pm on Jul 15, 2003 (gmt 0)

Does a Google search turn up any other webpages in Gujarati? I don't know if a search by me from here would, but if you search from your location with your settings... like, search for a common word or phrase in the Gujarati language, and see if anything comes up...
I'm just saying maybe someone else has gone through these issues as well. I don't know any speakers of Gujarati (Well, I probably do, but I haven't asked them if that's what they speak when they're not speaking English!) so I've never thought of the issue.
If you can't find any in Gujarati, think of another language with about as much global "market share" and see what they've done (if you know the language or can find enough words in it to make a reasonable search for it; I don't know much about Indian languages except that there are thousands of them and my college roommate seemed to speak most of them). It sounds complicated. I applaud your efforts, at the very least; I know so many people for whom English is a second language who make their own personal websites in it for no reason, when most of their viewers have English as their second language as well... but it's just what's "cool" there.

This leads me to a somewhat off-topic question-- people speak of finding out how many pages there are on Google by searching for "the". What about all the websites out there written in other languages? Seems safer to me to search for "a" or something... at least that happens in other languages!

g1smd

8:12 pm on Jul 15, 2003 (gmt 0)

Seems safer to me to search for "a" or something... at least that happens in other languages!

... except those in Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Sanskit, Hebrew, Arabic, and other non-Latin character sets.

dragonlady7

8:33 pm on Jul 15, 2003 (gmt 0)

>Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Sanskit, Hebrew, Arabic, and other non-Latin character sets.

I'd been wondering about them too... I started to ask about Japanese, because that's the only one I've studied at all, but I deleted it because I couldn't think what to ask.
What do non-Roman characters show up as? I think mostly I get blocks. What do they look like in Google's database, i wonder?
Ah well. I never install foreign language packs for IE or Windows, but I'll try them out in the future with my new computer. I should try brushing up my foreign language skills... I've studied so darn many of them and can't remember much of any! Sigh.

shweta

5:46 am on Jul 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi all,
thanks for ur suggessions.
I m tring on all these issues.

i'll let u know soon.

thanks
-Shweta

g1smd

6:23 am on Jul 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

What do non-Roman characters show up as? I think mostly I get blocks. What do they look like in Google's database, i wonder?

Well, all characters in all character sets are represented by binary numbers inside the computer, going from values of 32 to 255. What gets displayed on screen depends on the meta content-type declaration. So number 65 is the letter A in ISO-8859-1 but something else in another character set.

In fact, it is a little more involved than that. Some languages use 2 ASCII characters in storage to represent one displayed character, simply because they have hundreds of characters to display. The DBCS (Double Byte Character Set) are the ones that display as real garbage on a non-enabled computer.

If you install a browser such as Mozilla, you get support for a lot of this stuff right out of the box. Google SERPs display the correct characters if you have the appropriate character set and font installed. I often see Chinese and Japanese pages in listings. I assume Google uses UTF-8 for most of its work.

shweta

9:24 am on Jul 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi,
i go through the unicode website. [unicode.org...]

there r some pdf charts for each language. It has Gujarati.
But i m not getting how to use it.

i have also go through the following URl

[india-n-indian.com...]

it has some information using UTF-8 .
i tried it. but didn't work.

can u please visit these websites?

and let me know if u find something.

here r some links of some gujrati websites.

[gurjari.net...]

[sandesh.com...]

[sambhaav.com...]

just view sourse them. and see if u find something useful.

thanks a lot for giving me ur time

waiting for ue help

-Shweta

shweta

8:34 am on Jul 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi,
have u guys find any solution?

waiting for ur help
-Shweta

shweta

10:32 am on Jul 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi all,

Waiting for help.

any suggessions?

Thanks
-Shweta

jaski

11:02 am on Jul 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hi Shweta,
What you see at unicode site is only the specifications of how the unicode fonts should be developed. What you need is an actual font .. so they are not of any use.

You can develop the way sandesh.com has been developed.
They have used a True Type Font and they have put it up on the server for download. People can download and install the font and then read the pages.

That should be the easiest way to go.

gujrati.net is using gif images of text. If you want to do that .. you can do that using photoshop or any other image editor that can save files in gif format. Just type what you want using your font .. save it as gif and use it by <img> tag as any other image.

shweta

11:59 am on Jul 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi Jaski,

To view Sandesh.com there is no any need to download their font. We can view the pages directly in Gujarati without installing the specific font.

To provide a link to users for downloading the font, is the another option. But i want to develop the webpages in such a way that the users can see directly in Gujarati.

And there r some websites who has done this.

but how?

exactly like

[sandesh.com...]

[sambhaav.com...]

[jaihinddaily.com...]

They r using something like this ....in the head section...

just view source it.

Waiting for ur Help...

Thanks
-Shweta

jaski

3:01 pm on Jul 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

To view Sandesh.com there is no any need to download their font. We can view the pages directly in Gujarati without installing the specific font.

That is because that font might be installed in *your* computer already. When I open sandesh.com its all gibberish except the logo on top which is an image.

I tried the other links you gave as well .. same thing with them, I am not able to view it as gujarati text.

Also if you feel that your audience will have a gujarati font installed in their computers .. you can simply go ahead and use it .. there is no problem in that case.

takagi

5:25 pm on Jul 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

It looks there are several solutions in the examples you gave.

www.gurjari.net
All 'text' is in gif-files. Not so nice solution because loading pages will take more time, and search engines cannot find the content. The good thing of this solution is that it will work on any PC.

www.sandesh.com
Uses user-defined fonts.


<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=x-user-defined">
.
.
<FONT face=Sandesh color=#9900ff size=4>

The JavaScript file 'weblipi.js' is used to open an .eot (Embedded Open Type) or .pfr (Portable Font Resource) font
depending on the Browser. See also msg 10 by jaski.

www.sambhaav.com
Similar as Sandesh. Even JavaScript file has same name, but .eot and .pfr have different filenames.

www.jaihinddaily.com
As can been seen in the 'styles.css' file, this site uses an .eot font file.


@font-face {
font-family: JFINAL;
src:url(JFINAL0.eot);
}....
.blue {
FONT-SIZE: 18px; COLOR: #000099; FONT-FAMILY: JFINAL; TEXT-DECORATION: none
}

Will only work on Internet Explorer.

On Google Gujarati [google.com] the Roman alphabet is used.

None of them uses Unicode. Although that would be in theory the best solution, if your potential visitors cannot use it, then you have to use one of the options mentioned above.

jaski

6:11 am on Jul 20, 2003 (gmt 0)

Just a clarification. I could not view gujarati text as I said in #27 because I had font downloads disabled in my internet explorer. Sorry for causing confusion there.

So Shweta what I said in #27 that font is there in *your* computer is incorrect.

You are able to view these sites because of dynamic font as takagi explained above.

shweta

8:47 am on Jul 21, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi Takagi & Jaski,

I go through the following URL.

[cdacindia.com...]

It has information regarding how to use dynamic fonts.
But how to create .pfr and .eot files?

I also visited

[microsoft.com...]

If i download this weft application, then using this can i create .pfr and .eot files.

If not ...then how can i convert a true type font into a dynamic font?

I read the source code of www.sambhaav and sandesh.com

and according to them for using dynamic fonts we have to do
following things:

1. A HTML document which has a text written in any Indian Language.

2. A js script : for opening .pfr and .eot files on the server.

3. And we must have .pfr and .eot files on the server.

but again how to create these files?

waiting...

THANKS A LOT...

-Shweta

This 37 message thread spans 2 pages: 37