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Saivaneri Web Tutor

CHAPTER 17

Okay Boys and Girls! Our tuition is long – unlimited one isn’t it?. But I find no reason to keep the knowledge to myself, it’s always better to spread it. What I learnt in this Winter? Well that’s not a million Dollar Question, yet it has a useful answer. HOSTING A REGIONAL LANGUAGE WEB SITE WITH OUT USING ANY DYNAMIC FONT TECHNOLOGY! In previous Chapters, I blah – blahed about Dynamic Fonts, and how to BURN a PFR font or EOT font and use it on your HTML CSS STYLE TAGS so that your site will run that IDIOTIC dynamic font, slowing down the server and produce an imperfect bitmapped regional script, much to the chagrin of language loving souls. Thank god, no viruses spread due to that Goddamn Active X downloads. (Sensitive people pardon me). But Wisdom dawned sooner than later. So UTF-8 is born. Tamils or for that matter any mother tongue loving person can rejoice that fact. In 2002, Mr. Suratha Yazhvanan of Nuremberg Germany put a beautiful web page, here.. http://www.jaffnalibrary.com/tools/Unicode.htm That’s more than a page. It is the key for your web site’s lingual FREEDOM. What UTF-8 means? Unicode.org is an organization to spread computers to all languages of the world. It develops fonts coded universally so that all Operating Systems and Cross Platforms can support it, show it. FYK, I now run Mandrake Linux 9 with Tamil Commands. Yes, all windows, title bars, right clicks has TAMIL. How do ya like it on windows too?. So the same thing can be extended to WEB SITES also. So no need to download, no need to BURN a Dynamic fonts. No Whistle, No Bustle. By default Windows 2000, Windows XP has Arial Unicode MS and Latha Fonts as TAMIL fonts You can enable this as Default Font in the Internet Explorer by right clicking the IE icon on Desktop -> properties -> Fonts -> Arial Unicode ->Language script -> Tamil That’s a basic setting. You don’t even need to be permanently set it to view Tamil. But in a web page just use this meta tag =THIS IS MUST <META content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv=Content-Type> You can define the <Font> tags like this also, or just leave it blank, because the above meta tag automatically invokes Arial Unicode as the default font to show the site. =THIS IS NOT MANDATORY "FONT-FAMILY: aAvarangal,TAU_1_ELANGO_Barathi,Latha,TSCu_InaiMathi,TSCu_ArulMathi,TSCu_InaiKathir,InaiKathir_Unicode,Code2000,TSC_Avarangal,TabAvarangal2,Latha,InaiMathi_Unicode,InaiKathir_Unicode,Arial Unicode MS; FONT-SIZE: 14px; HEIGHT: 200px; WIDTH: 100%" This is for safety only, just in case the user does not have fonts, or corrupted the Arial Unicode or Latha fonts etc.. cases =THIS IS FOR WORST CASE SCENARIO <STYLE type=text/css>@font-face { font-family: aAvarangal; src:url(AAVARAN1.eot); } </STYLE> If you use this EOT tags, remember to have this EOT file in hand otherwise do not use it. I have used this at my site here http://www.saivaneri.org/tamilindex.htm check it and also try to use it at your site. BENEFITS OF UTF-8 1. NO NEED TO BURN A DYNAMIC FONT 2. WORLD’S MOST OF THE LANGUAGES, INDIA’S 13 LANGUAGES SUPPORTED 3. OPERATING SYSTEMS CAN BE MADE TO WORK IN LOCAL SCRIPT 4. FULL FLEDGED LOCAL LANGUAGE SEARCH POSSIBLE 5. THAT’S WHY GOOGLE.COM ALSO STARTED REGIONAL LANGUAGE SEARCH NOW. (VISIT WWW.GOOGLE.CO.IN AND TRY TO SEARCH IN TAMIL) 6. DATABASES CAN NOW BE MADE IN TAMIL AND FULLY SEARCHABLE! 7. ROMANISED SEARCH IS POSSIBLE (AMMA –FOR TAMIL AMMA SEARCH) 8. THIS IS THE FUTURE திரு. சுரதா யாழ்வாணன் அவர்களுக்கு இந்த கட்டுரை சமரப்பணம்

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