14 January 2003

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:

SVG supports:

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.