Appendix I: Internationalization Support

Contents

• I.1 Introduction
• I.2 Internationalization and SVG
• I.3 SVG Internationalization Guidelines

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:

• the ability to specify the rendering of particular glyphs which might not be accessible when defining character data using Unicode
• the ability to override the user agent's character-to-glyph algorithms
• the ability to follow the guidelines for normalizing character data for the purposes of enhanced interoperability (see Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals [CHARMOD]), while still having precise control over the glyphs that are drawn.

SVG supports:

• Horizontal, left-to-right text found in Roman scripts (see the ‘writing-mode’ property)
• Vertical and vertical-ideographic text (see the ‘writing-mode’ property)
• Bidirectional text (for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew - see the ‘direction’ and ‘unicode-bidi’ properties)

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.