International chars. in Tarantula 1.98

The web, which initially started off from the US, predominantly used the English language as it's base. However, with the web having spread all over the world, that is no longer true. A number of different languages are used, and so web pages with 'oriental' character sets are not very uncommon. The whole point is to have information accessible to people in a way they can easily understand, and having it in their own language is a big plus.

Tarantula supports international character sets, even going to the extent of providing a kind of 'on-screen keyboard', so people who have to type in a few words in a foreign language don't need a keyboard overlay to get things done. They can just click on the character set on the screen, and the selected characters are taken as if entered from the keyboard.

While generating HTML also, Tarantula can optionally convert all characters to their '&nnn;' equivalent. However, this feature can be turned off for people who want to publish their webpages using DBCS (Double-byte Characters - the character system used for oriental languages such as Chinese, Korean, Japanese etc.). Even when some foreign characters have been included on the page, the problem that remains is this : what happens when the surfer doesn't have the specific font that the page was designed with? Windows normally substitutes the closest matching based on what it knows, but then, if a page is designed in a non-english font, say some Hindi font, how does the browser render it when there is no known matching font? In such a case, the result will be completely unreadable and will not make any sense. One way out is to use embedded fonts, but the problem there is that older browsers will not recognize that, and this may not be compatible with different browsers. Tarantula has a workaround for this. This may not be a very efficient thing to do, but the text can be converted to an image, and the image included on the page. Now, since the text will be rendered as an image (something like a photograph of the text), it will be seen by everyone, irrespective of the fact that the font is installed on the system or not. The text-image itself does not take much space,as it can be converted to a very low bit-depth GIF image. Also, as an added benefit, Tarantula can add special effects and filters to this image. For example, shadows can be added, and blurs or softening effects can be applied. Of course, this feature can be used a lot in areas other than that of internationalization. Web-graphics is one such field, and no third party graphics software is required. The document on scripts contains one such text-image ("the mouse is here"), which was created in Tarantula. Here is another example (note that there are different font and colors in the same image:

And another, with the same text but a different effect applied to it :

[ Main ] [ Text ] [ Images ] [ Project and site management ] [ Thumbnails & galleries ] [ Forms ] [ Multimedia ] [ Multiple display resolutions ] [ Scripts and Applets ] [ Foreign language support ] [ Navigation & indexing ]