Hi,
I am a newbie in web development.
I want display hindi charsets on my website, for that I need utf-8 support.
When I test on browser, hindi chars are displayed properly but when I test in my mobile’s browser(which also supports utf8,utf16,iso10646-ucs-2,iso8859-1,iso8859-2,iso8859-15) it wasn’t displayed properly(printed some square chars).
When checked I found that there one more param in utf-8 called q which is passed.
So here I can say that if my browser supports ‘Utf-8’ there is no guarantee that it will display hindi characters properly.
So can any one tell me which is the charset (utf8,utf16,iso10646-ucs-2,iso8859-1,iso8859-2,iso8859-15) that supports hindi fully (100%) and not even 90%.
The term ‘charset’ is unfortunate, because it is used for two different things: character repertoires and character encodings.
HTML and XML (including XHTML) all use ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode) as the character repertoire, so I’m going to assume you mean character encoding.
The encoding is a scheme for representing a given character’s code position (index) within the repertoire, using one or more octets. (An octet is a group of 8 binary digits.)
The ISO 8859 series consists of small subsets of the Unicode repertoire. Each version is both a repertoire and an encoding.
UTF-8, UTF-16 and UCS-2 can represent any character – including Hindi characters – in the Unicode repertoire.
ISO 8859-1 mainly contains characters used in western European languages. ISO 8859-2 is the corresponding version for eastern European languages. ISO 8859-15 is basically a revised version of ISO 8859-1, to include the Euro currency symbol and some others. Neither of these three is capable of representing Hindi characters.
If you use the correct encoding (e.g., UTF-8) and you get squares on your display, the reason is probably that the font that is being used doesn’t have all the required glyphs. (A glyph is the graphic representation of a character in a given font.)
Try using another font family in your CSS style sheet, but it’s possible that your mobile browser simply doesn’t have the appropriate font.
Thanx for your response.
One thing is is my mobile doesnot has any option for setting the font family.
some of the hindi chars are visbile and while some in square brackets.
and can you please guide me which font family should be installed which supports hindi ?? (in case other mobiles has option for font family).
This probably varies from one platform to another. Modern Windows versions include fonts like Verdana, Georgia and Arial Unicode that contain glyphs for languages like Devanāgarī, Benghali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, etc. Fonts on newer Linux distros often have excellent support for most writing systems. I don’t know anything about fonts supplied with mobile devices, though.