Prabhat Hedge wrote, > > > >>* Indian language web-sites use mis-use charset tag "x-user-defined". > >> > > > >So do some non-Indian language web sites. > > > > But most of them do not need CTL (Complex Text Layout) support as is > essential for Indian scripts.
There are different reasons that people use the "x-user-defined" character sets. One reason is that, if the material is in HTML numeric character references (example क = क), at least one browser will have some display differences between whether the page is *displayed* under UTF-8 or "User Defined". In some cases forcing automatic "User Defined" encoding makes a better display. Another reason that people might use "x-user-defined" is to avoid the complex text layout requirement and Unicode encoding altogether. In this case, the page author would be using a custom (proprietary) font encoding. X-user-defined is not a valid character set, but, at least calling a page x-user-defined for a custom encoding scheme is not wrong. (There is no valid character set for these custom encoding fonts.) > Which means that either a glyph-set or font-encoding standard is > required or that all platforms that > need this support need to have OT/Intelligent font support. > The best way to render a Devanagari page is with Unicode encoding and smart font technology. With an up-to-date version of the Uniscribe software installed, Devanagari can be properly displayed even on Win 9x, as long as the browser uses the Uniscribe engine. Of course, for input and editing of Unicode Devanagari, the best (Windows) method is to use Win NT-and-up, which has built-in essential tools like keyboard drivers. There are "work-arounds" for handling Unicode Devanagari on platforms which don't use smart font technology. One way of doing this is to accept Unicode data from the internet, but convert it into a custom font encoding for display on older systems. (And, reverse this process when the user is sending data, convert the custom encoded material back into Unicode before it is transmitted.) There are various ways of handling this and somebody has to "do the work" of setting up conversion data tables. Because there are so many different custom font encodings for Devanagari, this can be a lot of work. Fortunately, people like Mark Leisher have already done a lot of work in this regard. If you are interested in this approach, please visit Mark Leisher's web site to learn more about using PERL scripts for this kind of conversion. http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/devnag.html Best regards, James Kass.
