[dns-operations] IDNs

[Doug Barton]

On 09/17/2011 09:15, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> On Sep 16, 2011, at 1:52 PM, Kim Davies wrote:
> 
>> I would not say it is the optimal solution, but what I'm considering for the IANA web site for a future iteration is font embedding. Web font embedding has become sufficiently advanced in the past year or so, that you should be able to reliably embed a suitable font in the CSS of a web page and not be dependent on locally installed ones. The advancement is both in all significant browser vendors now supporting the ability to embed fonts, plus importantly, type foundries finally offering appropriate licensing terms that allow for font embedding.
> 
> A more universally-usable solution would be for a zone to provide GIFs of each IDN in the zone. Font embedding can fail spectacularly in many ways for fonts that have lots of characters or lots of detail. GIFs are tried-and-true. I think there are a fair number of text-to-GIF scripts/libraries that work fine with local Unicode fonts on servers; some were used in the IDNconnect event a few years ago.

If it were me I would choose the ever-popular "all of the above." :)
Having a graphic of the IDN versions is a good fail-safe, and could also
serve as a sanity-check for font-based solutions.

Ed, FWIW, using Firefox on FreeBSD I can't see those 5 characters
either. I have a "medium" number of fonts installed, but I rarely run
across IDN characters that I can't display.

In my tests of other tools I found XFCE's Terminal to be the best at
displaying UTF. I set LC_ALL to en_US.UTF-8 which helps for GUI stuff.
This will probably help further:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

If you follow the links "Where do I find nice UTF-8 example files?" ->
"Markus Kuhn’s example plain-text files" and download at least the
UTF-8-demo.txt file you can easily test various terminals and other apps
that display text.


hth,

Doug

-- 

	Nothin' ever doesn't change, but nothin' changes much.
			-- OK Go

	Breadth of IT experience, and depth of knowledge in the DNS.
	Yours for the right price.  :)  http://SupersetSolutions.com/