Welcome to Our web page regarding our work to incorporate several foreign fonts into Tik

We are are currently investaigating and working on serveral additiosn to the Tik instant messaging cleint to implement a few built in fonts on order toa llow a few other languages with non-latin character sets to be used within Tik. We first plan on implementing Greek and Russian fonts, however we also plan on implementing later Celtic/Gaelic, Burmese, Runic, Cherokee, Arabic, Hebrew, and a few others as we indentigfy them.

Including in the enhancemnets will be a pop-up window which can be activited by clicking on a small button which will be located on chat and im windows. On it will be displayed a clickable grid including all of the characters, and a drop down list box to select one of the built in fonts. We also hope to add support for all system fonts to the map as well, but this will be a bit trickier, so that may have to come later. When the user clicks (or double clicks) on a character, it will be automatically added to the text entry field in the parent chat/im window. Although it would be possible for the user to install a font on thier system, and use that font to achieve the character set that they need, not all users have installed the fonts for foreign languages on there systems. To assure that these fonts will be avialble, we have decided to also include several built in fonts, which will consist of bitmap images which will be displayed instead of system fonts in the chat and im windows, when one of these built-in fonts is invoked. In order to transport these fonts over a latin based Ascii transport, we will map each of the characters in the software to an unused Ascii control code. Many alphabets are already implemented on the internet in this fashion, so, whenever possible we will try to use existing standards for mapping foriegn alphabets to Ascii.

Hopefully, font support in general will also be improved in Tik, and it does seem as though there are some others working on this. A drop down list displaying all avialable fonts should be added to chat/im windows, and as well the ability to use more than one font in a single message. That feature will be implementeds, o that if a user wanted to give a specific block of text in there text entry feild a certian property, they would select the block with their mouse, and then any changes made with the drop down font selection list, color selector, styles (bold, etc.), and hyperlink, would apply to only the selected text. The properties for all the text in the entry feild could be changed when no specific block of text is selected.