Appendix F: Internationalization Support

Contents

• F.1 Internationalization and SVG
• F.2 SVG Internationalization Guidelines

This appendix is informative, not normative.

F.1 Internationalization and SVG

SVG is an application of XML [XML10] and thus supports Unicode [UNICODE] [UNICODE21], which provides universal 16-bit encoding for the scripts of the world's principal languages.

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

• access to glyphs which are not defined in Unicode
• the ability to conform to the guidelines for normalizing character data for the purposes of enhanced interoperability (see [CHARMOD]), while still having precise control over the which glyphs are drawn.

SVG supports:

• Horizontal, left-to-right text found in Roman scripts (see the 'text-advance' property)
• Vertical and vertical-ideographic text (see the 'text-advance' property)
• Arabic bi-directional text (see the 'direction' and 'unicode-bidi' properties)

SVG fonts support alternate glyphs for Arabic and Han text.

F.2 SVG Internationalization Guidelines

(Only sketched out so far.)

Will indicate that SVG generators should follow W3C guidelines for normalizing character data [CHARMOD] and should use the facilities for Ligatures and alternate glyphs to override the standard glyphs used to represent normalized character data with specified glyphs.

It also might be valuable to provide a guideline for how to author a single SVG document that supports substitution of character data from different languages.