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Unicode
With
HTML 4
the 16-bit character coding
Unicode
(charts)
became an Internet
standard. It is supported by the latest versions of
Internet Explorer
and
Netscape
(version numbers 4 or greater). If you are using some older
version it is time to update - these browsers are freely available on
the Internet.
Unicode gives us the possibility to use 'all writings of this world'.
To be able to view pages written in Unicode also the fonts used in
the pages should be installed on our computer. The fonts that contain
also Chinese characters are quite
large
(13M).
Most European languages
(Latin-*),
Hebrew and Arabic are covered by freely available
OpenType fonts
(developed by
Microsoft
and
Adobe).
For viewing
these pages (on Windows 32 or Macs) it is sufficient to install OpenType Times Roman
(and also Courier and Arial) font.
Download it
from
TrueType core fonts for
the Web
and then run the file. For a test see the
OpenType Times Roman
Unicode table.
On some versions of Windows a richer font
Lucida Sans Unicode
is available that contains also IPA (phonetic) alphabeth and
large collection of mathematical and other special symbols.
How to use Unicode? There are few editors that support Unicode - MSWord does!
We can also use standard ASCII editor and enter non-ASCII characters as entities
by their Unicode codes as shown in the following example:
<![CDATA[
<html>
<head>
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
Some Nobel Prize winners:<br>
Björnstjerne Björnson, Frédéric Mistral,
Борис М.
Пастернак,
Ivo Andrić<br>
<font color=red size=7>☺ €</font>
</body>
</html>
]]>
that produces
Some Nobel Prize winners:
Björnstjerne Björnson, Frédéric Mistral,
Борис М.
Пастернак,
Ivo Andrić
☺ €
There are also other approaches to the fonts problem on the Internet:
FreeType Project;
Bitstream's
Truedoc;
Monotype/Unicode Conformant Font, ...
See also this.
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