Web site with unusual font

[Stuart G. Poss]

Thorsten Englisch wrote in response to Vratislav Richard Eugene Maria
John Baptiste:

> Japanese, Russian, etc. fonts aren't very useful for designing web
> sites. Mostly, they appear as senseless characters on the user's
> screen. The best thing you could do is to design them as PDF-File which
> can be viewed within the Web-Browser if you have the Acrobat Reader
> installed as Plug-In.

Unless, of course your natural language happens to be Japanese, Russian,
Boolean symbology, etc.

Thorsten Englisch's suggestion concerning PDF-files is a useful one, but
it should be noted that one can change the encoding on most browsers
(see fonts preferences in Netscape), so that they "understand" non-Roman
alphabets and syllabaries and display these properly.

If you find non-western languages of value, you may also want to look
into the Unicode Standard (see
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/uni2book/u2.html) or
http://www.unicode.org).  Unicode 2.0 is the most recent accepted
version.  Unlike PDF files, which are written in a proprietary format,
several ISO encoding schemes for HTML, of which unicode is but one.
Java handles use of Unicode in a straightforward manner and Java is
becoming a language of choice for web-development.

You may want to look in the March (#59) issue of the Linux journal
(http://www.linuxjournal.com/issue59/index.html).  They provide an
informative discussion of internationalization for programming/display
purposes.  Such approaches are interesting in that they are designed to
faciliate automatic translation.

If the text described is scanned and stored as an image (ie. gif, jpg
etc.), then it will appear like any other picture and should be readable
unless viewed using an improper aspect ratio or poor screen resolution
(or scanned without adequate resolution).  This might be the easiest,
albiet most expensive approach in terms of disk space, if your needs are
relatively circumscribed and you don't have the time or inclination to
also learn Java or  use of the unicode character set, etc.

Of couse, it still won't be "readable" unless you can actually read
Chinese, Arabic, Swahili, Mongolian, etc.

Hope this helps.

Stuart


Add the english transcription or
> better translation into your HTML-formatted listing of publications, to
> be sure, that more people get to know the title of them.
> Cheers,
> Thorsten
> +--------------------------------+-----------------------------------------+
> |  Mag. Thorsten Englisch        |                                         |
> |  Dept. Systematics & Evolution | tel. (+43 1) 4277-54158                 |
> |  Inst. Botany, Univ. Vienna    | fax: (+43 1) 4277-9541                  |
> |  A-1030 Vienna, Rennweg 14     | e-mail: engli at pflaphy.pph.univie.ac.at  |
> +--------------------------------+-----------------------------------------+
> |  Visit the Austrian Bryoweb http://www.pph.univie.ac.at/bryo/bryoak.html |
> +--------------------------------+-----------------------------------------+

--
_____________________________________________________________________
Stuart G. Poss                       E-mail: sgposs at seahorse.ims.usm.edu
Senior Research Scientist & Curator  Tel: (228)872-4238
Gulf Coast Research Laboratory       FAX: (228)872-4204
P.O. Box 7000
Ocean Springs, MS  39566-7000