From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Mar 22 2004 - 12:49:31 EST
From: "John Snow" <john@appliedlanguage.com>
> I work on sales rather than technical so I appologise in advance if this
> is basic!
>
> I am speaking to a client regarding there website being translated in to
> a number of languages including Bengali, Urdu and Punjabi which I am
> told is not very well supported by Unicode.
>
> Is this the case?
Not really. Unicode has enough support for these languages. However the lack of
support comes in other areas than what Unicode can do: browser support, fonts
availability, renderer engines, ...
> What are the potential solutions?
Prepare to have several technical versions of your web site if your product is a
web site. However you should have no problem to translate documents in easility
portable formats such as PDFs, or printed documents (I don't speak here about
document file formats)...
Some browsers will need NCRs, some will accept UTF-8, some will need a
"x-user-defined" encoding which is not a standard encoding for use in conforming
HTML 3.2...
For a web site, if you need to support several technical solutions, you may need
to have all your content edited once and adapted to the visitor's browser
capabilities, by some server-side script that will make the appropriate encoding
and syntax conversions.
For some browsers, you'll have no other choice than converting plain-text to
images. So it's up to you to see if it's worth the value to develop it according
to your own user base.
If you have time, just study the existing governmental web sites in India,
Pakistan, Nepal and Bengladesh. You may test them and look at the various
problems and limitations that occur depending on the choices that were taken.
For Urdu, however there's not much difficulties, as the Arabic script is quite
well supported and fonts are widely available, in lots of styles (however some
Urdu specific ligatures or contextual forms may be missing).
All these are my opinions, others may have different views...
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