Foreign Language Names

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dave
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Dave

Hi All,

Don't know if anyone has ever come across this but was just wondering.
Am programming something to be used in a number of countires and was
asking regarding Fonts. I have a page to printout that has to be in
"Helvetica" now if this program is installed in Russia for instance, I
can't see them calling it "Helvetica". Does anyone know if this is the
case and what can be done when fonts are hard coded into the software?

Thanks

Dave
 
Dave,

Fonts have nothing to do with any language Helvetica is Helvetica as well in
my language and so will Herfried do it. Helvetica is not English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica

Of course is this not for Chinese characters while I don't believe that
Helvetica contents the cyrellic character set as is used in Rusia (Middle
and Western languages use Roman characters).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic

However I forgot that since Januari there is a Russian MVP active in these
newsgroup (although more in some other Dotnet newsgroups), so I leave it by
this.

Cor
 
Does the user have a choice to change this - where would they see the font
name in your software? Would the font name be written in their native
language?

I am guessing for font names, some would be just like, or a lot like the
English version simply because they never had a word for it previously. But
it would mean transliterating into the native alphabet in the cases for
languages that don't share the english alphabet (e.g. Russian).

I think if this is a major product, then your company needs to outsource the
conversion of all the labels into appropriate translations/transliterations
into all of the languages you plan on supporting.
If you do not have such resources, I think you won't be able to figure it
out in all cases, so just stick with calling it Helvetica.
 
Dave said:
Don't know if anyone has ever come across this but was just wondering.
Am programming something to be used in a number of countires and was
asking regarding Fonts. I have a page to printout that has to be in
"Helvetica" now if this program is installed in Russia for instance, I
can't see them calling it "Helvetica". Does anyone know if this is the
case and what can be done when fonts are hard coded into the software?
Click to expand...

I do not have Helvetica on my German machine either. IIRC Windows comes
with Monotype's Helvetica clone which is called Arial. In general you'll
have to make sure that the fonts required by your application are present on
the target machine. This can be done as part of the setup process. Be
aware that you'll need to have the permission to distribute the fonts!
 
Then there's always the chance that someone didn't like the font, and
although it came standard with Windows, they chose to remove it from their
fonts collection...
Better stick to those fonts which come standard with Windows, and have a
couple of alternatives at hand, so that you can check during the startup of
your app if the font is available, and if not go for the next best thing.
 
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