Language support

Multilingual text input

GlyphGate provides language support by making it possible to both read as well as write in any supported language. Although languages of interest can be readily typed on a users own computer, a user may not be able to enter text into a form in a web page on just any computer. For example, a Japanese businessman might want to type a japanese message on an English computer at the airport in London, something that a british computer may not be equipped to do. For this support, GlyphGate uses something called SWIME (Simple Web Input Method Editor). It works much like a normal IME works: by assigning key stroke patterns to output characters. Using the Japanese input method supplied with GlyphGate it is thus possible to type "ichi" in a text input field the get the appropriate japanese character. The web page author decides which input methods that are "active" on the page. When a user later fills out a web form on the page he can easily switch between the different input methods provided.

Transliteration

In some circumstances it may be preferable to view text written in it's native alphabet in the latin alphabet instead. This is commonly known as "transliteration" or "romanization". This is a feature that GlyphGate provides for browsers that are only able to show english text, such as browsers for consoles on Unix (w3m, lynx and links) and more basic hand held devices.

Stacking diacritical marks

Some languages make extensive use of Latin characters with multiple diacritical marks. This is the case in for example Vietnamese and Yukon languages (Tagish, Kaska, etc). Showing such characters on computer screens presents problems to some operating systems. Multiple marks that are positioned above a character need to be stacked on top of each other. Some operating systems fail to do so and will let these marks overlap each other, or space them out next to each other, instead.

GlyphGate has been developed to address these problems on many different levels. These levels include support for entering diacritical marks on platforms without suitable keyboards, rendering text with fonts, and positioning diacritical marks appropriately.

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