What languages can your browser see?
What languages can your browser see?
Not read, see.
That is to say, if I put some text in a box, can you see it?
Some text like this:
Well, you could see that for sure, even if you couldn’t read it. (It happens to be Slovenian.) But what about:
I’d bet you could see that. Well… maybe. Actually, I’m not sure. (If you must know, it’s Korean.)
I’m pretty darn sure you couldn’t see that, but I can’t be positive.
This is actually a pretty serious problem: If you write server side software, you don’t really know what languages your users can see (well, what scripts they can see–several languages can be written in the same writing system, after all). Because you don’t know what fonts they have installed.
In the next exciting episode of Blogamundo Hacklog, I’m going to be stepping through a bit of Javascript that Jim Ley wrote on his blog which seems to be a very good first step towards resolving this problem.
I wrote a little wrapper for his code and it seems to succeed in answering the question “what languages can I send this user and be confident that they will rendered at least somewhat?”
But it’s not done yet.
So I guess this post was kind of a commercial for the next post.
PS. The last one was Amharic. Thought I wasn’t gonna tell you, huh. ☺
4 comments.
Technorati tags: fonts, Language and the Web, unicode
For your information, I can see the Amharic just fine.FF 1.0.7 on Ubuntu Linux/Gnome set to locale en_UK and a generous hand during font installation. Opera and Konqueror pull the right fonts just fine, too. (But had you chosen Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, I wouldn’t have been able to see them.)
Really keen to see the code - it’s a problem we’ve already run into with our own site.
For the record - Can see the first 2, not the third. Firefox 1.0.7 on XP Pro (SP1)
Chris: Hmm, how does Ubuntu handle font distribution? I wish there were some place with a list of default fonts for various OSes. Also, here are a bunch of fonts for Canadian syllabics and other Native American writing systems: languagegeek.com Font Downloads.
Ryan: Thanks for the details. Do you happen to remember offhand if you had to install Korean? As for the post, thanks for the interest — it’s going to take me a couple days yet since I have run across a bit of difficulty. In any case, here is Jim Ley’s post describing the basic idea: Jibbering musings » Fonts and Web Applications
Also, thanks for the response on your blog to my flags-for-languages post, there are some excellent thoughts there.
As soon as I posted that I realized that identifying countries is one case where using flags as symbols is just about optimal. ☺
I don’t recall installing Korean but there is some faint memory of checking yes to an Asian language pack at some point in my past - whether or not it was on this install on my laptop though I can’t remember.
Because of the business though - I’ve had to install Mandarin & Japanese fonts etc. though to view ours & clients sites - so I probably picked Korean up along the way.