How can one make a non-english site say in Hindi.One way is to use Hindi fonts but most of the users are not likely to have these fonts and will need to download and install them to view site properly I have heard of Unicode but have no knowledge of its implementation. Any solution? Thanks
Unicode is a system that uses unique bit information to code each and every letter of many many different texts-- so it doesn't make the conflict that ASCII does sometimes (why sometimes you read a website and certian letters or symbols, instead of looking like normal punctuation, make little symbols or blank squares). As long as YOU can type in Hindi on your keyboard, you can make a Hindi webpage I believe. I don't have special Hindi halant fonts, but I can read (well, look at) the text here just fine with a modern, common browser (FireFox) Look at the page and in your browser go to View>Page source (or right-click on the page, select View Source), and you'll see that the page has set the charset to one which includes most letters of most languages <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> The UTF-8 is the important part. Scroll further down the page and you can see that the person has simply typed in the Hindi letters between the <p>s. It's slow and NOT ideal for you, but if you don't have access to a real Hindi keyboard, you COULD use the online Devanagri keyboard (where you type in English keyboard and it prints to the screen the Hindi characters...) but I wouldn't waste the time.
It does not look as good as a genuine Hindi fonts like arjun or kruti dev when displayed in Opera 'Halant' everywhere - but displays without problems ( read 'Halant' ) in IE6 How? Do browsers implement Unicode differently? Where can i find Online Devnagri keyboard?
You REALLY don't want to type a page with this. This thing's purpose is for searching a word or two in a search engine when you can't type it at home: http://hindikeyboard.indiapress.org/ Better to get a real one.
True! it is quite slow. But one questions remains unanswered - Unicode is supposed to be universal how come it(Hindi) is displayed differently in differenr browsers (Opera & IE) http://unicode.org/unicode/standard/translations/hindi.html - see the same page you wrote about in Opera.
I looked but I'm not a Hindi reader. The font looked thin and more like monospaced. I dunno why-- in the html the guy wrote (h3 italics bold) tags... so, maybe it's some default font thing in Opera... otherwise, I have no clue. To me, it still looks like Hindi. Maybe there's a unicode page where you can ask someone specifically about cross-browser presentation of non-roman fonts?