| To create multilingual documents that make use of alphabets with characters that differ from the one you use primarily, you'll need to adjust the encoding of each page and know which character set(s) is needed for your page. A character set is a group of characters that have been combined for a specific purpose, such as characters that make up an alphabet. An encoding system is the method by which the characters in such a set have been mapped to the bytes of data that represent them. | | 1. | Open sanskrit.html from the Lesson_02_Content folder. Choose Modify > Page Properties and select the Title/Encoding category. From the Encoding pop-up menu, select Unicode 4.0 UTF-8 (Macintosh) or Unicode (UTF-8) (Windows). Click OK to close the dialog box. You can leave the rest of the dialog options set to their defaults. Note You might receive a warning dialog box informing you that the selected encoding does not have all the characters that were using in the original encoding. Click Apply to confirm and apply the new encoding.
The default encoding used in Dreamweaver is Western ISO (Latin 1), which covers most West European languages. (ISO stands for the International Standards Organization.) Note The Western ISO (Latin 1) encoding, also known as ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1), might not be the default for international versions of Dreamweaver. Unicode is a universal character set that is inclusive of the majority of characters in a large number of languages. It is intended to act as a superset of most other character sets by allowing a single document to contain characters from many diverse languagesit is both multilingual and multiplatform. You can use the UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format 8) encoding to display characters from multiple alphabets. It is ASCII-compatible, which is the format commonly used in .txt documents, as you learned earlier in this lesson. UTF-8 is supported by Windows 2000 and Macintosh OS Xalthough you might still need to provide a link to download a Unicode font(s) and/or specify particular unicode fonts. Older browsers and older operating systems might not support UTF-8. You might need to use the UTF-8 encoding if you need to use characters that are not in Western Latin alphabet (or vice versa, depending on the language you use), such as making use of the Japanese Katakana alphabet (foreign words) and/or the Hiragana alphabet (Japanese words). You might want to use characters from other alphabets in your documents if your company has a multilingual environment or offers services in more than one language. In this exercise, you'll learn to do this by working with Sanskrit words using the Devanagari alphabet. | | | 2. | In the Text folder, open sanskrit_terms.rtf in an application such as TextEdit (Macintosh) or WordPad (Windows), select everything, copy it, and paste it into the sanskrit.html document. Your document should look similar to the example shown here.
To import text that uses characters from other alphabets, you'll need to either copy it from another document, as you've done in this exercise, or create it yourself through the use of language kits that give you access to other character sets through either input menus or directly from the keyboard. Macintosh OS X provides support for a wide number of languages. You can modify your current settings and access the different languages through the International section of the System Preferences. The Input menu allows you to select the way in which you want to work with different characterssuch as through the keyboard or an input palette. Windows 2000 and later versions of Windows support multiple languages through Unicode. | 3. | Save the sanskrit.html document and preview it in a browser. |
You might want to test the page in multiple browsersnot all support the use of Unicode. Note An alternative method of displaying content in other languages and alphabets is to use graphics. Images however, can make modifications occur much more slowlytext has the benefit of being updatable quickly and easily directly in Dreamweaver. Text is more accessible, flexible, and portable than images. You can close the sanskrit.html document. |