[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