2012-05-20 22:55, Zigzag wrote:
> [...] for the
> foreign character sets (ie, chinese, korean, japanese etc), I'm using
> the unicode numeric reference example:&#xxxxx; ...
That's possible and works independently of the character encoding of the
HTML document, but it really makes HTML source hard to read. It's
comparable to writing "hello" as "hello" (which
is possible).
> I normally state the page language in the HTML tag (ie <html lang="ko">)
> also, using the meta tag:
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="ko">
Neither of these has much effect, but the former can be regarded as good
practice in principle (the latter is then redundant). Beware that it may
change the default font used by the browser, as this can be
language-dependent. Any setting of the document's overall font family,
say body { font-family: Gulim, Malgun Gothic }, will override that,
though, whenever it lists any specific font that is available in the
user's system.
If you open the Settings in Firefox and select Contents, there's a
button for "additional settings" for fonts (I'm using a Finnish version
now, so I don't know what the exact English terms are here), you can see
(and modify) the settings for various character repertoires, like
Korean, setting the default serif font, default sans-serif font, and
default monospace font. The factory defaults for these defaults are
probably reasonable, though perhaps not optimal.
The morale is: If you use lang markup, you should expect variation of
fonts across browsers, and possibly fonts other than those that would be
used without the lang markup. But you can largely remove this variation
by explicitly specifying a list of fonts, in order of preference.
> The web pages all seem to show up well on a new Mac computer,
> but on an older PC laptop, none of the Korean, Chinese or Japanese
> shows up properly. (firefox renders little squares with a stack of
> numbers& letters in them; opera renders plain squares).
This is most probably due to lack of suitable fonts on the PC, but it is
also possible that the browser just can't find a relevant font and needs
a little help. Testing on different browsers browsers may reveal this.
You can also try with the following style sheet:
* { font-family: Batang }
This should work on Windows XP and later.
More info: Guide to using special characters in HTML,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/characters.html
There's a specific issue with Korean: you can write a hangul syllable
using one syllabic character, or as decomposed, using several
characters. The choice between these representations isn't supposed to
affect the rendering, but in reality it may, due to font limitations and
program limitations.
--
Yucca,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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