Scripsit Andreas Prilop:
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>I just seen the web site of the unicode committee and was amazed to
>see the site showing document in Hindi without using any such fonts
>like "Kruti Dev" or "Dev Lys". "Webdunia.com" is also showing
>documents in Hindi without the need to download any specific font.
>How's that done?
>
With UTF-8
You can see this if you access e.g.
http://www.unicode.org/standard/translations/hindi.html
and select View/Encoding in your browser; you'll see the encoding "UTF-8"
selected, because that's the encoding specified on the page and the browser
uses it. (Actually, the encoding would better be specified in HTTP headers
as well, but nobody's perfect.)
For Hindi on the web, UTF-8 is clearly the only feasible solution. Other
Unicode encodings such as UTF-16 are possible in principle, but less widely
supported. There is an 8-bit encoding "ISCII", for writing Indic languages,
that has been used to some extent but it is not officially registered, but
it isn't recognized by browsers. Finally, you _could_ use any encoding (even
US-ASCII) and represent Hindi (Devanagari) characters using character
references like अ, but that would be too awkward and too inefficient
(except perhaps for short fragments of texts in documents that are mostly in
another language).
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>Also, can I build such a page?
>
You need an editor that can save documents in Unicode UTF-8.
This still gives a wide range of opportunities, see e.g. the software listed
at
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities.html
I also noticed a page specifically about authoring in Devanagari:
http://tlt.psu.edu/suggestions/inter...evanagari.html
By the way, if you look at the Unicode page I mentioned, you'll see meta
tags that indicate that it was created using Microsoft FrontPage 6.0. I
don't particularly recommend that software (note that the HTML markup on the
page is rather poor), but this shows that you _can_ use Unicode even if you
just play with common office programs. Moving to Unicode is often just a
matter of using the possibilities in the software you are using now, rather
than getting some fancy novelties.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ 
