Foreign Characters In Squidoo With Unicode

Boy Writing Chinese Calligraphy
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Step 1. Enter your text in a word processor.

Step 2. Do a screen capture of the characters you want to include in your lens.

Step 3. Use an html <img> tag to include the image file in your lens.

Example html: <img src="http://yourimageserver.com/Image/ChineseSquidChars.gif" />

See the following lenses for more info on using html <img> tags.

HTML for Photos: A Tutorial for the Semi-Clueless - Adding images to lenses using html.
Basic HTML for Squidoo - Another good lens on adding images with html.

Intention Art Print
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Say you wanted to display the chinese characters for "squid" as an example. In order for the html NCRs to display properly, the person viewing the lens, must have a font installed that supports chinese characters. Not everyone will have the necessary fonts, but users that would be likely to read a webpage in chinese would most likely have a chinese font installed.

Here's an example of what they might see.

鱿鱼 - Displayed using html unicode NCRs

- Displayed with html <img> tags.

- what the viewer will probably see without correct fonts installed.


So depending on how much text containing foreign characters you want to display, using jpg image files might be preferable. It will display the characters even if the user doesn't have the correct fonts installed.

Foreign Legion Adventures
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Do a screen capture by pressing the PrintScreen key near the top right of the keyboard. For Windows users, this will copy the contents of the screen to the clipboard. You can then paste the resulting screen capture into Photoshop, The Gimp, or any graphics editing software. For linux users, pressing the PrintScreen key brings up a dialogue box that allows you to save the contents of the screen to a file on disk.

Once you have the screen capture loaded into your image editing software, crop the image down to show only the characters you want to display.

Because sometimes, different computers, or even different software applications on the same computer, use different codes or numbers to represent the same character.

Computers don't store letters! Computers can only store ones and zeros. It just looks like they store letters and words because we tell the computers how to convert the ones and zeros, into letters. In fact there's something called the ASCII table that is a standard method used by computers for just that purpose. For instance, computers that use the ASCII table, will store the letter "A" as the number 65, the letter "B" as 66, and so on.

The problem is that the ASCII table only tells a computer how to convert the english alphabet to numbers, plus a few other characters. It just doesn't have enough space in the table to represent all the characters from all the different languages in the world. So computer companies ended up creating a bunch of new tables that tell a computer how to store characters, and nobody really agreed on how to do it.

Kerala, India Art Print
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Love Art Print
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So this is where The Unicode Consortium enters the picture. They are a collaborative group of major computer corporations, software producers, database vendors, government ministries, research institutions, international agencies, and well, lots of smart geeky type people.

The Unicode Consortium created the Unicode Standard, which they describe as:

Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.

Unicode supports Cherokee indian and Cuneiform too!

And they mean business too! Unicode includes characters from Runic, Ethiopic, Cherokee indian, Hanunoo, and Glagolitic scripts.

Unicode Charts - List of all the different scripts (languages) included in Unicode, and charts of all the individual characters.

One of the nice pearls of wisdom I gleaned from this book is that good usability means that a user interface behaves like the user expects it to. Each time something happens that isn't what the user expects, their satisfaction level goes down.

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Read the reviews.

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition