TECH: Unicode support (was Re: Translations: work slogans (was Re: Which language is this? (once again)))

On Sun, 05 Feb 2006 07:37:15 -0500, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
wrote:

>> Hindi, written (as one might expect) in Devanagari.
>
> Ooh.  That would have been cool if it had come through.  I'd love to
> have a browser that dealt with all the complications of Devanagari. :)
I use Opera from http://www.opera.com/ which has the best Unicode support
of every browser that I have tried, and I've been through quite a few (it
does Plane 1 without a single configuration change, for instance). Opera
is a great program, combining a web browser with clients for email,
Usenet, IRC and RSS in one application, with a really clean and tidy user
interface, and all (of course) with the same excellent Unicode support. I
could ask for a more powerful and general purpose filtering mechanism, but
it's quite far from a deal breaker, and it does work once you get used to
it. Oh, it doesn't render Ruby, which may or may not be a deal breaker for
some people.

Add to it a decent range of fonts from http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/
and some configuration of font choice within Opera, and you'll be good to
go. Alan Wood's site is without doubt the very best Unicode resource site
I have ever found.

Of course, this all presupposes Windows. Linux does crazy and apparently
random things with fonts and font substitution when dealing with Unicode.
It's quite spectacularly broken, espectially for something so proud of its
internationalization and localaization efforts. I can't speak for OSX,
unfortunately, but I expect Apple to have spent some time getting it more
or less right.



Paul

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