Media Matt

Upon completion of a recent interactive project, our team learned many things regarding Hindi & multilingual support for complex characters. When using these characters, the computer is required to have Arial Unicode MS installed as a font and it requires additional regional language support added to the operating system.

After installing the font, in Windows XP go to the Start Menu, Control Panel, Regional and Language Options. When the new window comes up, select the Languages tab and select the box that says “Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages (including Thai)”. A Windows XP cd may be required to install this extension. Reboot the computer and all the fonts should display correctly. Windows Vista installing may differ a little.

If using these complex characters in flash, the text needs to be set to “Dynamic Text” and you need to set the text to “Use device fonts”.

More documentation on rendering for multilingual support can be found on Wikipedia. Further information on complex text layout and bi-direction text can also be found on Wikipedia.

Tagged as multilingual + Categorized as Web Design