From: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org (ecto-digest) To: ecto-digest@smoe.org Subject: ecto-digest V11 #145 Reply-To: ecto@smoe.org Sender: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk ecto-digest Wednesday, May 25 2005 Volume 11 : Number 145 Today's Subjects: ----------------- completely OT, making websites in non-latin alphabets [Karen Hester Subject: completely OT, making websites in non-latin alphabets Kia ora Please delete immediately if disinterested in computer question. I have become so entangled. We (public library) are putting up lots of webpages in foreign languages for our local migrant communities. That's easy for Samoan, Somali, French - just a few accents to worry about; fine for someone like me who is an html amateur. It's kinda ok for Chinese and Arabic, because the characters in the translated Word documents can be cut'n'pasted straight into the html editor. They don't go kerplooey. So http://www.wcl.govt.nz/languages/chinese.html looks ok, though I'll have to put something in the header to tell the browser to use simplified chinese or utf-8 :) Hindi (ie Devanagari script), Khmer, Sinhalese/Sinhala etc are proving more difficult. Ha! IT assure me I've got all the language stuff loaded, and I can read other webpages in those languages. I've had to download specific fonts to read the translated Word documents (so I'm wondering what the arial/times/courier equivalents are in other scripts); I can't paste the text into notepad or my editors without it going kerplooey; I can't figure out how to change the Hindi Word doc into a mangal.ttf notepad doc (like http://www.bbc.co.uk/hindi/index.shtml do) ... I can't find any free Word->unicode coverting programmes, but working with hex/decimal could be really confusing if that's all you see. Using kerplooey pasted text works, but that is bad html since it's dealing only in fonts, not in languages. (eg "vaOilaMgaTna isaTI laayabai`o" type stuff comes out as Hindi if Bharat Darshan is defined as the font and you have it loaded - http://www.wcl.govt.nz/languages/hindi-sin-test.html works if you've got fonts Bharat Darshan and kaputadotcom). Maybe I'll have to do that, and find the most common fonts. Or maybe I'll use image files for some languages, like http://www.maribyrnong.vic.gov.au/Page/page.asp?Page_Id=563&h=0. I dislike the pdfs we've used here http://www.wcl.govt.nz/about/joining/translations.html Karen, confused, and on the search for someone who knows something. ------------------------------ End of ecto-digest V11 #145 ***************************