The latest creation from Byte Level Research, available for purchase at bytelevel.com/eyechart.

This unique take on the Snelling eye chart includes characters from more than 20 languages.

It’s the perfect gift for an eye doctor — as well as the globally myopic.

Here are the details on my sessions:

Localization World
Seattle, WA

• October 6: International Search Summit
• October 7: The Next Ten Years of Web Globalization
• October 7: Making Your Website Truly Global — and No, We’re Not Talking About Language

Unicode Conference
Santa Clara, CA

• October 19: Improving the Global Gateway: Established and Emerging Trends in Multilingual Navigation

If you’re planning to attend either event, please let me know. I’d love to meet.

It’s not easy having an American English keyboard when you frequently need to input characters like è or ä or ç.

Or ¥. Or €.

Maybe it’s because I switch between Mac and Windows so frequently. Or maybe I’m just too lazy to remember the keyboard shortcuts.

Fortunately, I just discovered: CopyPasteCharacter.com.

Give it a shot and you’ll see how it works.

I’ve got the site bookmarked.

Now I’ll just have to remember where I saved the bookmark. ☺

PS: TypeIt is also a great solution.

The Kindle has gone international, sort of.

That is, Amazon is launching a new Kindle outfitted with a radio chip that works in most of the world’s cellular markets (100+) — as opposed to the US-only Kindle, which operates only on Sprint’s network.

Unfortunately, just because someone in, say, Russia will be able to download a book, doesn’t mean that the book itself will display Cyrillic characters.

You see, even though the Kindle may operate in much of the world, it is still a Latin-only device.

I learned this the hard way when I helped adapt Forgetting English for the Kindle. For example, in the short story First Sunday the Tongan line “Pou’li ā, Sione” came out as “Pou’li a, Sione” — minus the ā.

That’s because “ā” and many other extended Latin characters won’t display properly. Needless to say, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese aren’t going to have much luck either. Based on my parsing the sparse documentation on the Amazon site, I understand the issue isn’t a lack of Unicode support but a lack of font support.

Apparently you can use this Unicode hack to get your Kindle to display non-Latin characters, but this is hardly a mainstream solution. People shouldn’t have to download their own fonts to display the books they want to read. Basic font support in an e-reader is, well, something you would expect to find installed by default.

I’ve since come across a number of people who develop books for the Kindle who aren’t exactly happy about the situation.

Why doesn’t Amazon include a Unicode-friendly font on its device? Perhaps this was by design, to save on memory. After all, a Unicode font can easily weigh more than several MB, which takes away from precious book storage space.

My opinion is this: Amazon didn’t design globallay from day one. And that’s a shame for readers and writers alike. When you compare the Kindle with the iPhone, which supports more than 30 languages, I can only say that I’m looking forward to the coming of the iTablet.

Still, I get a kick out of Maxitweet.

To understand what it does, here’s an example.

I entered the following text: 149 characters.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore

And Maxtweet squeezed it down to 136 characters:

Caǁ me ʪhmael．Some years ago–never m㏌d how▕ong precێely–hav㏌gl计ᅱe or no money ㏌ my purse，and noth㏌g particular to interest me onshore

Those funny looking characters interspersed are pulled from Unicode’s wide pallet — such as ێ (ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH SMALL V). This character was used in place of “is.”

Other substitute characters used include “计”, “ʪ”, “㏌”, and “．” (I hope they all appear on your browser. Note that this blog is in Unicode but you may not have the right fond needed to display the characters)

Normally when I see this type of character substitution I think of phishers creating bogus domain names. But for once this traditionally nefarious technique has found a recreational application.

Here’s how the Tweet came across on on my iPhone:

Go Unicode!

But I can never seem to remember what those shortcuts are.

Fortunately, there is TypeIt, an online editor that gives you the ability to input non-ASCII characters used by languages such as Spanish, Hungarian, and Russian. Here’s a screen shot:

Operating systems like OSX and Windows also give you the ability to change your keyboard virtually — but that can be a real pain if you only need to input an á.

Tomasz Szynalski launched TypeIt in 2004, and the site gets about 35,000 visits a month. Some people use the editor like I do — to crank out a few characters — while others use it to write entire letters. Russian is the latest keyboard added — and I hope to see more to come.

The site is www.typeit.org.

One of the things I first noticed (and love) about the Web browser is the .com button on the keypad, shown here.

Of course, this little shortcut isn’t so handy if I want to visit a .org or .edu Web site.

It’s also not much use for visiting country-specific Web sites, such as www.yahoo.fr.

Which is why the localization of this interface is going to be an interesting thing to watch evolve.

It is just a matter of time before we see the iPhone launched around the world. So does that mean the .com key will be replaced by .de or .fr keys? I imagine so.

This will give companies yet another good reason to register country code domains. While a Web user in France may first go to acme.com and then navigate to acme.fr when visiting a Web site. Using the iPhone, it’s likely that person will simply go to acme.fr, an example of a new interface changing user behavior.

The other interesting thing I’ve noticed on the iPhone so far is that it doesn’t appear to be using a “conventional” Unicode font. That is, I’m finding that the interface displays Chinese and other Asian scripts just fine — as well as Cyrillic — but it can’t display Arabic or Hebrew scripts. What this says to me is that Apple doesn’t have the Middle East on its near-term global expansion plans. My guess is that it’s using the scaled-down font to conserve drive space. Documentation is hard to come by so far so I’d love to hear from anyone out there who knows more about this.

I’ve been to Europe once so far and the iPhone held up quite nicely; AT&T didn’t hit me up for too much in roaming fees. It is interesting — though not surprising — that you can’t de-activate cellular roaming and just rely on Wi-Fi. I did have a faulty power adapter but got that replaced at the Apple store with no resistance.

But back to the Web browser. I know this has been said many times before, but this is the first phone that makes browsing the Web about as easy as it is on a computer. And I suspect that over time this will have an impact not only on how companies develop Web sites in the US, but how they localize these sites for markets around the world.

Microsoft first migrated to Unicode for its Windows 2000 operating system. In doing so, it cleared the way for faster development of global software. It also allows users to more easily share documents that includes multiple languages and scripts.

This Microsoft article details why Microsoft upgraded to the latest version of Unicode for Vista, coming to a computer near you, and how this will benefit developers. In short, the benefits of doing so include the ability to support a few more languages, enhance security and collation, and support internationalized domain names (something I’ll be writing more about in months ahead).

It’s nice to see Microsoft upgrading to 5.0, as this will prod other software makers to do the same, although most no longer need much prodding.

According to Amazon the book is still in pre-order stage. And I’m curious to know if Amazon is serious about the free shipping option — after all, this book weighs in at a whopping 1,400 pages!

Says the press release: “The Unicode Consortium announces the release of a significant update of its widely-used Unicode Character Database (UCD). The new version, Version 5.0, defines more than 99,000 characters for the languages of the world, and provides the detailed properties needed for computer software implementations. This latest level of the UCD contains all the information needed to update software to support the characters and algorithms that are the foundation for all modern computer programs — including the latest data for Unicode security mechanisms, collation, and locales.”

A print version of the standard is forthcoming. I have version 3.0, which weighs in at more than a thousand pages; I can only imagine how big the 5.0 book will be. Actually, if you want to get a true feel for the significance of Unicode, you really need to get the book. I got such a kick out of browsing through all those characters from all those languages that I don’t speak. It puts little ol’ English in perspective. It’s an impressive achievment.

At this point it seems the improvements to Unicode are more about wiring and plumbing than simple character additions. Fewer than 2,000 characters were added this time around. But those characters do represent five new scripts: Balinese, N’Ko, Phags-pa, Phoenician, and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform.

I’m still in awe of Unicode and the people who developed it. Thanks to Unicode we can post multiple scripts on one Web page (whether or not they all display properly is another issue). Thanks to Unicode, a global company can purchase one content management system and, assuming it supports Unicode, allow all of the offices to contribute content, in nearly any language.

One application; many languages.

When I got into this field in 1999, creating a Japanese-language Web page required purchasing the Japanese OS of Windows, for starters. Those were the dark ages indeed. Thanks to Unicode, so many of the technical hurdles are gone, allowing people to simply communicate.

You can read all the details of 5.0 here.

Robert Scoble has taped an interesting interview with Michael Kaplan, who’s the technical lead in charge of the globalization of the upcoming Windows Vista OS.

If you’ve got a half hour to spare, it’s worth a watch. It gets a bit techie at times but there are some grest nuggets of wisdom for anyone involved in software or Web globalization.

If you don’t have the time, here are a few items that jumped out at me…

-> Vista is being localized into roughly 100 languages (some partially) — this is, as I understand, about twice the number of languages that were supported by Windows XP. By the way, this blows away the number of languages support by Mac.

-> Microsoft is “opening it up” and “getting out of the way” — which means that they know that they won’t be able to localize Windows into a thousand languages anytime soon, so they are working to create the tools to allow folks around the world to customize Windows to their languages and cultures. I’m glad to see Microsoft doing this — Michael introduced a nifty keyboard tool that you can use to create your own keyboard layouts. Very nice.

-> Vista will support roughly 200 locales. This is a big increase from XP. A locale includes such elements as language, date format, currency format, etc.

-> “You can’t know everything” — is Michael’s advice to other world-be internationalization engineers. So true. This is one thing I really love about this field — there are just too many languages and cultural nuances for anyone to know it all. It means that we’re always learning something new and that teamwork is essential to success.

-> Get to know Unicode. Unicode came up several times during the interview. Microsoft was an early promoter of Unicode and Unicode truly has revolutionized global software development. The last remaining non-Unicode area on the Internet is the DNS — which engineers are grappling with as we speak.

Anyway, it’s a great interview. Check it out.

Michael also has a blog

For those who don’t get it, that funny little question-mark character is what Mac users see when their computers don’t have the right font to display a given character (or if the Web browser gets a bit confused about what font to display). Just because Unicode allows you to display the world’s major languages on a Web page does not guarantee that your Web users have the right fonts on their end.

Windows users see blank boxes — and yes there’s a shirt for Windows users as well:

The shirts are available from Cafe Press. I wonder if I can get one in black…

The Single Most Important Fact About Encodings

If you completely forget everything I just explained, please remember one extremely important fact. It does not make sense to have a string without knowing what encoding it uses. You can no longer stick your head in the sand and pretend that “plain” text is ASCII.

There Ain’t No Such Thing As Plain Text.

If you have a string, in memory, in a file, or in an email message, you have to know what encoding it is in or you cannot interpret it or display it to users correctly.

Almost every stupid “my website looks like gibberish” or “she can’t read my emails when I use accents” problem comes down to one naive programmer who didn’t understand the simple fact that if you don’t tell me whether a particular string is encoded using UTF-8 or ASCII or ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1) or Windows 1252 (Western European), you simply cannot display it correctly or even figure out where it ends. There are over a hundred encodings and above code point 127, all bets are off.

For the article, go to: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Question:

What is the ‘Document Character Set’ for XML and HTML, and how does it relate to the encodings I use for my documents?

For the answer, go to: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-doc-charset.html