CJK characters handling on Internet for thin clients

Abstract

Web pages in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (often called CJK) are now very commonly posted in Asian Web sites. No Web browsers can view CJK characters without the installation of suitable fonts. However, font installation is quite complicated and a lot of memory space is required to store fonts, making it infeasible in the thin-client environments. This thesis presents an Internet-based font display server called Pelutech that is primarily intended for display of CJK characters in image forms without the need for font installation. Pelutech acts as a display proxy to process requests and responses between client machines and a Web server. The system relies on the character-to-image conversion technique at the server side to produce small CJK character images to be sent to client machines. The comprehensive features of Pelutech include: (1) the ability to detect font sets on client machines as well as codesets in which requested Web pages are coded; (2) comprehensive HTML parsing and its unique ability to handle form controls and searching so as to maintain the ability to interact during Web browsing even when characters are converted to images; and (3) the provision of an Internet based input method engine so that users can browse CJK Web pages with text input ability independent of the environment of their Web access devices. The proposed Internet-based solution is highly suitable for thin-client machines having only limited hardware or software support.