Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Dunno. I suggest you try them and see.
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Do you then see, Harry, why--with all due respect--I am semi-regularly irked to the edge (and I hope not beyond, or too far beyond) of civility on account of people offering expert statements on topics where their knowledge does not even extend to
knowing the issues, never mind knowing the solutions to them.
I recall the suggestion that right-to-left writing is not supported. Therefore Arabic, and all other languages that use the Arabic script are out.
Vertical writing is pretty much certain not to be supported. And I think it is unlikely that ePub viewers have the ability to intelligently select the one font (from two or more specified) that actually has a glyph for each given character... I'm not even sure it is reasonable to expect such work from so thoroughly underpowered machines as eBook readers.
The only other way then is to programmatically surround characters that require it, in an additional <span> with the css class specifying the alternate font. A workaround that underlines ePub's (well, really HTML's) unsuitability for the task.
And then, there is, of course Chinese Typography whose rules differ considerably from that of any Western language. (The same is true for many other scripts that "technically" could be supported by ePub, but practically [for reasons of typography] basically cannot reasonably be.) Does any ePub implementation even try to use those?
Indic languages for the most part would depend on the ability to handle OTF character/glyph morphing and possibly special typographic rules.
In other words... if nobody on this board has the slightest idea whether ePub would work for a certain 2 - 3 billion portion of humanity, and there are in fact good reasons to assume it does not... can we collectively stop sagely pretending that it's perfect (or even usable) for eBooks, regardless of language/script considerations.
- Ahi
Ps.: I just read your comment about arabic. If it really works fine, then Indic languages should work ok as well... assuming differing typographic rules are taken into consideration... which I personally doubt.