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19 July, 2001

# Appendix I: Internationalization Support

### Contents

This appendix is informative, not normative.

## I.1 Introduction

This appendix provides a brief summary of SVG's support for internationalization. The appendix is hyperlinked to the sections of the specification which elaborate on particular topics.

## I.2 Internationalization and SVG

SVG is an application of XML [XML10] and thus supports Unicode [UNICODE], which defines a standard universal character set.

Additionally, SVG provides a mechanism for precise control of the glyphs used to draw text strings, which is described in Alternate glyphs. This facility provides:

- the ability to specify the rendering of particular glyphs which might not be accessible when defining character data using Unicode
- the ability to override the user agent's character-to-glyph algorithms
- the ability to follow the guidelines for normalizing character data for the purposes of enhanced interoperability (see [CHARMOD]), while still having precise control over the glyphs that are drawn.

SVG supports:

- Horizontal, left-to-right text found in Roman scripts (see the 'writing-mode' property)
- Vertical and vertical-ideographic text (see the 'writing-mode' property)
- Bidirectional text (for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew - see the 'direction' and 'unicode-bidi' properties)

SVG fonts support contextual glyph selection for Arabic and Han text.

Multi-language SVG documents are possible by utilizing the systemLanguage attribute to have different text strings appear based on the client machine's language setting.

## I.3 SVG Internationalization Guidelines

SVG generators should follow W3C guidelines for normalizing character data [CHARMOD]. When precise control over glyph selection is required, use the facilities for Alternate glyphs to override the user agent's character-to-glyph mapping algorithms.

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