[WEB4LIB] Dynamic Fonts

[Andrew Cunningham]

At 02:03 PM 4/4/01 -0700, Jeff Papier wrote:
>Hello ListFolk,
>
>One of our library organizations wishes to donate a PC to be used only for
>reading foreign-language publications online.  The idea is that it's a
>pain to "manually" download all of the necessary font sets on all of the
>public Internet PCs, so a single machine should be set aside as the
>"universal font recipient."

personally, I feel all PCs should be multilingual, if you have such a
culturally diverse population. Here in Victoria (Australia), we're rolling
out multilingual access in every public library in the state, this invloves
a range of training programs that have been developed and   that we take
and run at each library service.

>
>What's bugging me here is that the use of dynamic fonts seems to be on the
>upswing, and that the money earmarked for this donation could be better
>spent on other things.
>

I assume that you are refering to languages that do not have inbuilt
support in internet explorer or netscape 4

dynamic fonts will not work on Netscape 6, and from memory will only work
with 8-bit fonts.

we tend to be moving more towards the use of eot fonts rather than dynamic
fonts, since eot can support the requirements of complex script unicode
fonts, where as dynamic fonts cann't. 

>Does anyone have any idea whether such fonts will soon replace  those you
>have to download yourself?  We have a truly multi-ethnic community here in
>South Brunswick, and I've seen any number of patrons
>reading, e.g.,  Chinese or Gujarat publications thanks to fonts that load
>themselves as needed.

It depends on what langauges you are using. You'd never use dynamic fonts
for chinese .. the download and rendering time for the web page would be a
killer.

but tene CJK support is fairly simple and trivial now .. since netscape 4
and IE3+ have support for CJK

with Indic langauges, we start ot fall into the area of lack of support ...
most indic langauge sites require you to downlaod fonts because most sites
are made with custom software. There is a national standard "ISCII", but
very few sites actually use the ISCII standard. 

The software developement market is tending towards Unicode solutions, on
Windows platforms that means that Microsoft have to create appropriate
support in Uniscribe and Rich Edit ... Windows 2000 can out with support
for Hindi and Tamil in Unicode, this support was also included in IE 5.5 if
you had installed one of the langauge packs for a complex script language.

by a complex script language I mean a language that needs to be
contextually rendered.

Windows XP will add additional support for Indic languages .. not sure
which ones yet ... although I do know, that there are a range of web
developers using the Syriac script (Neo_Aramaic, Assyrian, etc.) who are
waiting for the release of Windows XP to start work.

Additional languages will appear in post-Windows XP OSes. Microsoft doesn't
add new languages in service packs.

>
>My interest is not in the wisdom of setting aside one PC versus 10, or the
>administrative hassles involved in limiting equipment to certain uses.
>It's the font technology I'm wondering about.  Comments upon its
>miraculous properties, disadvantages, overall use, etc., will be much
>appreciated.
>

Personally, adding additional fonts to PCs isn't that much of a hassle, and
usually the sites you need to add additional fonts for are usually minority
languages. The major langauges all have built in support, so its only a
question of appropriate installation at the beginning

i could be more specific if I knew precisely what langauges you required.

essentially language support on web browsers is relatively trivial

One thing to note though ... Netscape and Internet Explorer were developed
for monolingual or bilingual use. In the case of IE and MIcrosoft products
in general, thats part of their design philosophy. Microsoft does not
design and test their products in multilingual environments.  And depending
on whether you use IE and what OS you use you may encounter some of the
bugs and design flaws that exist in IE.

Netscape 4 is ideal for some languages, while IE is mandatory for others.



Andj.

Andrew Cunningham
Multilingual Technical Project Officer
Accessibility and Evaluation Unit, Vicnet
State Library of Victoria.
Australia

andrewc at vicnet.net.au

http://go.to/andj/
http://www.openroad.vic.gov.au/
http://www.openroad.vic.gove.au/libraries/