By joel_guesclin on

I'm struggling with a problem, trying to set up a site in Bengali (Bangla) - which, I hasten to add, is not a language I understand.

I'm running into problems with the fonts (just a starter!). Apparently, despite being one of the world's most spoken languages, Bengali has not made its way into Windows/XP yet, so that it is impossible to display text correctly unless you already have bangla fonts installed on the PC. In addition, they have to be the right fonts.

Now, I would like the site to look nice (if incomprehensible) to people who visit from other countries than Bangladesh, so I am trying to find which fonts would be best to use for the site, and are most commonly used in that language's websites.

I have several questions:
1) Technical: is it possible to define a font in HTML such that it downloads to the workstation and gets properly recognised in the browser?
2) Does anybody know what fonts would be systematically installed on any Bengali-enabled workstation?
3) Does anybody know of a more specialised forum where I could find this kind of information?

Thanks for the help, again

JG

Comments

joel_guesclin’s picture

joel_guesclin commented

Well, I continued hacking about and made some discoveries which I place here for anyone interested:

1) Yes, you can download fonts to your web page: as a quick hack, i modified the drupal_get_html_head function in common.inc to include the following code:

  $output .= '@font-face {';
  $output .= '  font-family: Solaiman;';
  $output .= '  font-style:  normal;';
  $output .= '  font-weight: normal;';
  $output .= '  src: url(http://localhost/bangla/SOLAIMA0.eot);';
  $output .= '}';

(note that you can't see the fact that there is a "STYLE" statement around this because otherwise Drupal throws me out with a "Terminated because of suspicious input data").
You then have a font-family called "Solaiman" which you can refer to in your CSS.
The downloadable font can be generated from a TrueType font by using the WEFT tool available for free from Microsoft.
Thanks also to the helpful people at omicronlab.com who produce a very nice Bangla keyboard and UTF-8 compliant fonts for downloading, as well as having a forum for questions.

Now I just have some issues with CSS in Chameleon to sort out, and I think we will be ready to rock and roll!

Of course the modification to common.inc is just a quick hack, and in reality I think I will do this with a Drupal module.

garm’s picture

garm commented

that method works, but i would recomend using sifr to make sure your visitor sees your fonts as they should appear, it´s a slightly better method then what you´re using (in my opinion)

http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/

it degrades perfectly if the user dont have flash and it´s search engine friendly, shows off the fonts as they should be viewed and it works perfectly with drupal (just do a search there´s a thread showcasing how to implement it in drupal).

joel_guesclin’s picture

joel_guesclin commented

I have looked at sIFR following the suggestion posted above, however it does not look like the solution to my problem.
The major issue I have is not one of making "pretty" fonts, but the fact that the standard fonts that you will have on a Windows machine do not include the Bengali glyphs.
To see the difference this makes, compare the BBC Hindi web site with the BBC Bengali site. If you have not installed any special fonts, then the Hindi site will work, while the Bengali site will not: the BBC even provides a font download page to get round this issue.

SIFR is not appropriate as a solution to this problem for three reasons:
1) It relies on a Flash player which people do not necessarily have installed or want.
2) It "degrades gracefully", but for Bengali there is no degrade option. If I degrade to Arial for example, I will see nothing but square boxes.
3) A final clincher: SIFR is not designed for site content. To quote Mike Davidson (on his beautiful site): "sIFR is a powerful tool. So powerful, in fact, that you can completely ruin a web page with it if you get overzealous and don't exercise restraint. Early on in development, a dude in Texas e-mailed me and asked me why his sIFR-ized page took 30 seconds to load. I looked at the page and he had replaced every single word with sIFR text... even complete paragraphs and 300-word passages. Do not do this please! sIFR is for headlines, pull quotes, and other small swaths of text. In other words, it is for display type -- type which accents the rest of the page. Body copy should remain browser text. Additionally, we recommend not replacing over about 10 blocks of text per page. A few more is fine, but once you get into the 50s or so, you'll notice a processor and speed hit.

The unfortunate thing is that the WEFT technology is Microsoft - and Firefox absolutely does not support it, nor does it appear to have any alternative. Well, too bad for Firefox I guess.....

garm’s picture

garm commented

yes sifr is alot more cross os/browser friendly which is why i suggested it because the amount of people that dont have flash is far far less then the people that weft wont work for, so 1 is not an issue (or well it is, but alot less then using weft will make it)

2, i do agree upon to a certain point (see my css explanation further down), the number of people that would be affected by this would still be alot less then the number of people that wont get weft to work.

And you could always use the degrading ability of sifr to display a message explaining your situation and with links to the macromedia, flashplayer installation (which is just a few kb), you could also use that degrading ability to provide links to the font in question, and if you specify that font in your css, the ones that dont have flash and dont want to install it would only have to install your Bengali font and then see all the text content as it should be all thanks to how sifr degrades.

3. yes this is 100% true, however unless you´re loading alot of sifr files (swf files) per page, you will be able to load alot, and i do mean alot of text without it affecting performance.

So, is there any good solution for your problem, NO, there isnt, but sifr is the lesser "evil" of the two solutions you do have at your disposal.

Anyway, good luck with your project, but in the end of the day, sifr and weft is what you have to choose between.