Language Packs

[dBjason]

Hello,

I have a website (HTML/CSS) which has "hello!" written in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. Works great on my box, looks nice, etc.

Problem is that most of my U.S. visitors won't have the language packs installed on their boxes. So the Korean, Chinese and Japanese characters are just boxes (viewing from my friend's computer). I really don't like that. Even though my U.S. visitors probably can't read the characters, I'd still like it if they saw them.

Trying to make a table and inserting jpg images from text snapshots doesn't look much better. To be honest, I'm really not a graphics or web guru.

Is there any way to notify the user that they might need a language pack installed to view the page directly? And if they click yes, just go ahead and install?

Alias link:

http://www.jasonspelts.tk

(yeah, I know... I'm cheap!)

Thanks in advance,
Jason

 

[Vragabond]

To answer your questions:

1. Yes, you can put a little notification that every user will see. This notification will annoy many people, whether they have the language pack installed or not.
2. No, you cannot make them install the language pack, because your page should not manipulate their computer. Besides, you don't know which version of Windows they use, or if they even use Windows.

And now, for the solutions:
1. CSS3 supports adding custom fonts to your website and have the browser download them. This is supported by most modern browsers, even IE, although that one has certain extra requirements. Read more on it here:

http://paulirish.com/2009/bulletproof-font-face-implementation-syntax/

2. If the one above is too complex, for your use I would recommend images. Just make a print screen of your page as you see it, crop everything but all the foreign scriptures (there is no reason to separate them) and save the file as .gif (it will work much better than jpeg, because you don't need all the colours jpeg offers but you would prefer the crispness of gif). Then simply insert it as an image -- without any table.

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