This demonstration ePub 3 book was created with IGP:Digital Publisher for AZARDI. It demonstrates the multi-language power of standards-based digital content production and delivery solutions.
It contains 28 languages listed in an "around the world" sequence. This includes latin character, logographic, scripted and right-to-left representations of many of the worlds languages.
It starts from the Interational Dateline with Maori from New Zealand. The sequence follows the sun around the world with languages ordered approximately by longitude. This was to avoid a default latin alphabetic listing. It was also more fun!
There was considerable language-font-angst with the release of ePub2 and the very limited language options available in most readers and devices. The status of fonts and embedding was ambiguous, and publishers of languages other than English had a difficult time.
At the dawn of ePub 3 it is important that language accessibility is a high priority for most of the world. This ePub 3 attempts to address the issue of language diversity and can be used for testing by anyone.
In 2011 most desktops have all language fonts installed by default, but we have been careful with this first multi-language test book. It needs to work. This ePub 3 contains the Open Source SIL licensed DejaVu font set to ensure that the largest possible set of languages is displayed correctly. To really test other ePub 3 devices and readers a version without font embedding may be released.
Unfortunately the fonts embedded in this book does not include logographic languages such as Chinese, Korean and Japanese, nor the Indic scripted languages. We have to reasonably assume that content users in those languages have the correct fonts installed on their machine. In our own installations modern operating systems make the widest range of fonts available.
As there is currently no reasonable Chinese or Indic fonts available in Open Source with clear SIL (or similar) licenses (that we could find) we have not embedded any of these fonts. We would welcome any information on this.
This demonstration contains the United Nations Declaration of Universal Rights in 28 different languages in a single ePub 3.
The United Nations Declaration of Universal Rights apparently holds the Guiness Book of Records most translated document record, if that is significant. However it is a very useful for testing digital content and ePub Readers in particular.
What is most important is Unicode and the Unicode Consortium. The content was sourced from the Unicode Consortium.UDHR Project.
All copyright statements have been left intact on each page. Styles and metadata have been added by Infogrid Pacific.
The Unicode Consortium has been working since 1993 to make content accessible to all, in every language. They are perhaps the greatest unsung heros of the computer age. Their achievement transcends operating systems, devices and technology, and addresses the needs of humanity in a unique way.
Of the languages included in this ePub 3, the following languages are supported by the included DejaVu Fonts:
The languages that AZARDI does not directly support with fonts and where suitable fonts will have to be available from the Operating System: