One thought on “My tweets”

1. I can’t say I know all the details, but I keep half an eye on this on the web-browser-development front. The primary (technical) driving factor that I’m aware of is the distribution of *fonts* – specifically, fonts that actually have glyphs for the relevant unicode code points.

   I’d hazard a guess that the distribution of who can see what is driven primarily by what OS they’re using, and what font-heavy applications they have installed (MS office and Photoshop being prime candidates that I’m aware of). I can see them all in Firefox on Windows 8.1, but I’m missing several (Gujarati, Oriya/Odia, Sinhala, Tibetan, Aramaic and Burmese) in Chrome/Firefox on Android 4.1.

   Twenty years ago, it was a disaster area, as the base font set in the leading OSes was terrible once you stepped outside those languages with large populations and lots of computers, and IT in general was still reeling from the shock of the transition from 8-bit ASCII with code pages to Unicode. Things have been steadily improving since then. Still a way to go, but getting there.

   I suspect the poor showing for Chinese/Japanese is because, historically, OS suppliers (i.e. Microsoft) tended to ship different font bundles to different regions – while those in regions where those are day-to-day languages got fonts that included appropriate code points, most of the rest of the world didn’t.

   (And, yowza, that’s a heavy-duty captcha you’ve got going on there…)

Comments are closed.