Java Internationalization and Localization

Determining the font name

If you have IE (5.0 through 5.5), it is easy to find the font used to display a particular language. For example, I would like to find out the fonts available for displaying Chinese web pages. I can do the following:

Access the IE menu: Tools/Internet Options/General/Fonts (see Figure 1). Then use the following fonts to display Simplified Chinese text.

• Bitstream Cyberbit
• Microsoft Sans Serif
• MS Song
• NsimSun
• SimHei
• SimSun
• Tahoma

Due to the large character sets of many Asian languages, their font file is larger than the character sets typical of most Western languages. With this knowledge, we can sort the font listing based on file size as shown in Figure 2 from Control Panel/Font.

From the figure shown above, one or many of the above fonts "Batang", "Bitstream Cyberbit", "SimSun & NsimSun", "SimHei", and "MS Song" can be used to view Chinese characters. We can use Navigator 4 to test which particular font is suitable.

In Navigator 4, go to Edit/Preferences/Appearance/Fonts, and set the preferences as shown in the following figure.

With the completion of the above setting, access the site http://www.zaobao.com to view the text correctly when that particular font is used. In this case, the SimSun font can be used to display Chinese characters.

Yet another way of knowing what font can be used to display native text is to use Office 2000 for opening the native text file. It will automatically detect the encoding, then format the text with the necessary font.

Creating font.properties.en for Netscape 4

With the font on your system and the knowledge of what font name to use, we can create font.properties.en for Navigator 4 so that our Java applet will display Chinese characters.

First, create a copy of font.properties.zh file found in Netscape's ..\classes directory. Then rename the file font.properties.en in the same directory.

font.properties.zh for Netscape 4 can be found at

C:\program files\netscape\communicator\program\java\classes

Edit the font.properties.en by replacing all occurrences of \uXXXX unicode strings related to the SimSun font. In our case, replace \u5b8b\u4f53 with SimSun.

With this new font.properties.en your Navigator 4, we will be able to display the Chinese characters when we use any of the logical fonts in our Java applet.

We can make changes to the original font.properties too. However, it is easier to distribute font.properties.en, so that we aren't required to backup files.

The NEFontFactory Helper Class

Now we want to create a helper class, called NEFontFactory, which will have the following features:

• "Write Once and Run Everywhere"
• Font caching
• Font creation
• Font name listing
• Able to compile using JDK 1.1 and above since our target is an applet.

The Helper class makes use of a Factory Pattern to create Font objects.