indic-computing-users

[Indic-computing-users] Web Pages in Indic Scripts

[Vijay B. <vij...@fr...>]

Dear Friends,

I have to make a website in Indic Scripts. ( To start with it is going to be
in Telugu and English and later on Hindi, Kannada, Malayam and Tamil are to
be added.) SOme part of the sute can be static, which I need immiditely. The
site also needs to have dynamic data (data driven site) and not just static
pages. In this regard I need the following information as I am new to this
field.

1. What fonts should I use ?
2. What tools are available to generate these pages ?
3. Static pages in Indic fonts can be rendered on the fly, or user need to
have fonts installed in the system ?
4. What kind of database is conviniant to use ? ( MS-Access, MySQL or any
other)
5. Where can I get more information on these issues ?
6. Are there any proven GNU / commercial solutions availabe for this kind of
work ?

Regards,

Vijay Barve

Re: [Indic-computing-users] Web Pages in Indic Scripts

[Guntupalli K. <kar...@fr...>]

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 15:19:40 +0530
"Vijay Barve" <vij...@fr...> wrote:

> 
> 
> Dear Friends,
> 
> I have to make a website in Indic Scripts. ( To start with it is
> going to be in Telugu and English and later on Hindi, Kannada,
> Malayam and Tamil are to be added.) SOme part of the sute can be
> static, which I need immiditely. The site also needs to have dynamic
> data (data driven site) and not just static pages. In this regard I
> need the following information as I am new to this field.
> 
 Long term approach is to use unicode (utf-8) for web pages.

> 1. What fonts should I use ?
Cleint will need to have installed unicode / opentype fonts, also his
browser should support unicode rendering. or you can send content in
different encoding/fonts based on client browser.

> 2. What tools are available to generate these pages ?
 perl/php should be able to generate utf-8 pages.

> 3. Static pages in Indic fonts can be rendered on the fly, or user
> need to have fonts installed in the system ?

 Best if they have it installed.

> 4. What kind of database is conviniant to use ? ( MS-Access, MySQL
> or any other)
PostgresSQL, MySQL support unicode/utf-8, so u can use them.

> 5. Where can I get more information on these issues ?
search around for multilingual vendor sites on what they are doing.
you can get many links from indlinux.org/bookmarks.html

HTH,
Regards,
Karunakar

-- 
A Reasonable man adapts himself to the world
An Unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to himself
So all progress in the world depends on the Unreasonable man - GB Shaw

---------------------------
* Indian Linux project    *
* http://www.indlinux.org *
---------------------------

[Indic-computing-users] Re: Web Pages in Indic Scripts

[<alo...@so...>]

Hi Vijay, 

If you have a multilingual site, having a single encoding would make things 
easier at the backend. Therefore UTF-8 is the best option. Apart from that 
it would be just like any other website. 

> 1. What fonts should I use ?

Use unicode encoded fonts. 

> 2. What tools are available to generate these pages ?

Any of the regular tools for page generation would work. Only, your webpages 
will be utf-8 encoded that's all. You can see 
http://geocities.com/linuxparichay/kaise.html for details of html meta tags. 

> 3. Static pages in Indic fonts can be rendered on the fly, or user need to
> have fonts installed in the system ?

User will need to install the fonts just as he needs them to view Latin 
characters. Dynamic fonts are supported by IE but not by Mozilla(Netscape 4 
used to do that). 

> 6. Are there any proven GNU / commercial solutions availabe for this kind of
> work ?

Try babelkit -
http://freshmeat.net/releases/120564/ 

Hitesh(cc'd) has developed such a site - I forget the url.
It would be a good idea to survey the Fonts+browsers+os to find out which 
ones would be able to render the content. For devanagari, 
http://geocities.com/alkuma/seehindi.html would be a good guide. 

Regards
Alok