what you don't know about latin-1 might hurt you
french cf users might want to pay attention to this...there is an on-going discussion on the unicode list about "internationalization assumption" which simplistically goes something along the lines of if latin-1 is tested ok can we assume all latin-1 languages are "a-ok"? as it turns out, "no". some of the folks participating in this discussion have pointed out that, for example, not all french chars are found in latin-1. my first thought on reading that was, "oh yeah, the euro" but as it turns out there are a couple of french chars (no idea of their frequency of use but they are used in the french words for eye, egg, beef and heart) that are not in latin-1 but are in latin-9. for example see jukka pela's excellent latin-1/latin-9 comparison page. these chars are also found in windows 1252 code page (which i guess helps support the idea that it's actually a superset of latin-1).
the moral of the story? just use unicode
posted by Paul Hastings @ 10:12 AM
2 Comments:
Unicode is great for encoding, but if you are embedding fonts in flash, you need to know what is the smallest set of characters for a given language. (Embedding all unicode characters would probly be a couple of GB?)
It would be nice if there was table somewhere with what chars are needed for what languages.
no idea about flash but arial unicode is only 20 odd mb. there are plenty of fonts that contain varying amounts of "unicode".
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