Is there any reporting tool which offers multilingual support (namely English en-US and Arabic ar-KW) and support for Web report viewing in IE6 and above. I don't want to end up making different reports for each added language. Development platform for this is ASP.NET 3.5, Crystal Reports or any compatible reporting tool, SQL Server 2000/2005, IIS 6/7.
One way I figured out works if we are only working with the static data then we can add and replace the translations of static text (labels, headers etc) using reports formulas. I'm not sure whether it works with older reports versions but I've tested and it did worked with CR 9 and above. But this is off no use when we need to change the positioning and ordering of the reports columns as well for right-to-left and left-to-right layout languages like English and Arabic...
What is the recommended and best known/developed way to deal with this?
Any bright idea and help would be appreciated.
Please try http://www.stimulsoft.com/
This has all you can dream of and even more !!!!
I mean it !
(It has localization inbuild in the reports so you don't have to make multiple reports etc,just change cultures etc if you know .net culture classes etc)
(There is a version that works on web)
You can use i-net Clear Reports (used to be i-net Crystal-Clear). It support translations of your reports with resource bundles. It support also mirroring of Arabic reports.
Our ActiveReports Product supports multiple languages in the scenario you describe. Being the number one selling report writer in Japan for many years now has also allowed us make big investments in international support for complex languages like Japanese and Chinese that others tend not to such as special handling for exporting Japanese or Chinese characters (and other languages) to PDF.
Scott Willeke
GrapeCity
Izenda AdHoc Reports
provides wide opportunities for multilingual support.
You could change static text(labels etc.) as well as testxs from the database on-the-fly. Really on-the-fly, i.e. change language in one click.
Izenda AdHoc supports right-to-left languages "from the box" and also there is Arabic language pack already. If you need another dialect you could contact support and they will tell you how to get it.
And another great thing is you can easily change any translation you'd like by just editing simple XML file.
Related
Is there a formal standard I can use to to rate the accessibility, especially for visually impaired people, of my MVC3 web application? If there are various standards, as I suspect, which should I give preference to for a web application primarily targeted at people with no or minimal visual impairment, but strongly wanting to offer as much as possible to visually impaired people? This is a learning management application, so wide accessibility is important.
I am trying to stick to best practices in terms of HTML and CSS semantics and such like things, documented in the handful of books I have, and I am using HTML5 validation in Visual Studio for my Razor views. What other tools can I use, preferably on the development side, before I deploy and can use the various online validators? Are the any online rating tools?
Standard (and reference list)
The W3C standard is WCAG 2.0.
The WCAG 2.0 Recommendation tries to be technologically agnostic and to apply to all kinds of websites, even web apps but the consequence is that it's rather unspecific. HTML/CSS/Script Techniques (as well as the Failure ones and Flash/Pdf/Smil if you use them) and the Understanding part are good reads.
For daily auditing I prefer to use:
AccessiWeb 2.2 reference
list,
"a methodology to verify conformance to WCAG 2.0" that "facilitates
(its) understanding and implementation".
There are references to WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria and Techniques but alas no links. Hyperlinks exist on the french version but weren't added on the english one, alas (I'll try to fix it with them this month).
The script part, essential to webapps, is again partly unspecific but that's because it's hard to be so without having 10x as tests! There are thousands of things to do with JS when there are a hundred of HTML elements.
EDIT 2014: this checklist has been updated to new techniques in HTML5/ARIA (an awesome work imho) but only in french. AccessWeb HTML5/ARIA (in french) May be translated in english in 2014 or 2015 or try an online translation service ;) 70% of tests are common with AccessiWeb 2.2 and the new tests are up to date HTML5/ARIA techniques already working in modern websites with the browsers and screen readers quoted in Annexes.
ARIA, as in Accessible RIA, is another work from W3C-WAI:
(ARIA) especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user
interface controls developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related
technologies.
No doubt this is the future of accessible web apps but its support is a work in progress in browsers and assistive technologies. Also old screen readers'll never be compatible with ARIA and they're very slowly being replaced for newer versions because they cost A LOT (thousand(s) of USD/EUR for JAWS).
Thus webdevs must always create apps compatible with both old plain techniques (using tab key and space to access information and interact with it) and new ones (manipulating a tree with arrow keys, being informed of changes in a Live region while reading another part of the page).
ARIA is complicated, needs time and experience, etc
ARIA doesn't replace WCAG 2.0; huge improvements'll be seen with WCAG 2.0 only.
not everything is as complicated as a tree implementation. Landmark roles are very easy to add in any website for example.
If you use jQuery UI, there exists an accessible version of popular modules/scripts: http://hanshillen.github.com/jqtest/
It isn't perfect yet but it's far better than the original. In my experience, you can't mix the legacy jQuery UI scripts and these ones (though I didn't try for too long, I could easily be wrong).
Testing
I wrote about 2 useful services, Opquast and Tanaguru, in another answer. The other answer from BrendanMcK related to automated tests is a must read.
WAVE (fluffmyboner already wrote about it in the other answer) both exist as a toolbar and as a webservice. Main difference afaik: the WAVE toolbar'll analyze the DOM of your page while the webservice'll analyze the HTML+CSS sent but won't execute any JS
TAW (select inglès than WCAG 2.0) is another service for analyzing a few criteria
Wave is my go-to for accessibility validation, although I'm not too sure about what you can use to check pre-deployment.
I am trying to make a website in Right to Left Language. Instead of GIF's I chose WEFT to embed the special fonts to be displayed on Client's machine. But it is not working. something goes wrong.
Or else WEFT is not supporting the Right to Left language font.
Is there anyone who worked in weft in Right with Left Language....?
I tested this feature for the MSHTML team about 12 years ago, but not for complex scripts. Are the client's machines ones that have Complex Scripts support installed? They need to have that support installed in Windows (Uniscribe in particular, and supporting tables in NLS in general) for IE to deal with complex scripts.
It would be helpful if you described your specific problem.
I don't think Weft did much more than create a minimalist version of a font wrapped inside a special format. But it may have been missing some truetype tables that are essential for complex scripts. I doubt my old contacts on the complex scripts team at MS are still involved
in IE. Michael Kaplan might have some suggestions; you could try his blog. http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap . He has written a bit about WEFT from time to time.
It's also possible that support for WEFT has changed a bit since IE8, so make sure you clarify which browsers you've tested with, and what language support is installed in the client machines.
You may also want to specify DIR="RTL" in your HTML on any Arabic or Hebrew regions, or on the root HTML element, especially if you are using UTF-8 as your encoding.
Thanks a lot for guidance so briefly.
I checked in all the major Browsers and versions as well. I specified the DIR="rtl" too.
I am using UTF-8 encoding....
I will check the blog you told.
I am beginner in web designing, I using CLASSIC ASP for web development.
My client need his website in two languages (Arabic and English).
What is the best way for develop website in multiple language?
I read some information from website's :-
Create website in two lanuages. for example (www.example.com/English/)and (www.example.com/Arabic/)
2.Use transilaters(Google,SpeakFish,etc..) for your default website.
Anyone can help me for this which is the suitable way for develop website in multiple languages?
Any reference or any links?
hoping your help
There are several methods:
your first method - create two different sites - has as advantage that the texts can be custom tailored for each language
create a single site, but display every text with a function that knows the current language and shows the text in one or the other - will be easier to update, but a little harder to change all translations
I would say don't use automatic translators - they do a lousy job. Better let a human do this.
Build a single website using a CMS that does multilanguage out of the box, or supports plugins for multilingual sites (F.A. Joomla + JoomFish).
Online translators always create a really terrible reading experience, so please get a (possibly trained) human translator to covert the texts for you.
How do you minimize the pain in your development process when it comes to reporting?
For web frameworks, there is a pretty straightforward way to both produce content as well as graphically design it; content is represented semantically through HTML, and the design is separately specified through CSS. And browsers are fairly consistent with how they render the output (and the inconsistencies are well-known and can be planned for). There are even WYSIWYG editors to help out less-CSS-savvy graphical designers.
But what do we do about print content?
At one company, I created a process that worked like this: A script generated a semantic representation through XML. The XML was passed through XSLT to generate an XML-FO document. Then, this was passed to another tool (Apache FOP, I believe) to generate a PDF. This worked well for that company.
At this company, however, output appearance matters to management, and we have a graphical designer. Currently, we are using a reporting tool (XtraReports from Developer Express, version 8.1). It isn't bad; it outputs to a variety of formats, has a WYSIWYG designer, reports are implemented through C# classes, and it supports data binding to data sets (unfortunately, not POCO's). However, we have some major pain points with this setup:
The reporting framework has major limitations on how you can lay out and group your reporting bands
Presentable elements, especially charts, lack the capabilities we need to fine-tune and achieve the look of our mock-ups.
There is no good way to share styles and layout among reports akin to what we can get through CSS.
Good composability of reusable parts is very hard to implement. So we end up with a lot of copy & paste inheritance of functionality; this is bad news whenever we need to make sweeping changes across all reports.
Now, maybe there's some kick-ass framework out there that can eliminate the pains of reporting frameworks, but I assume that they all have their weaknesses. Do you have a framework or process that works well for you and reduces the pain points inherent in reporting?
Prince XML is a really cool tool which allows you to use HTML or XML styled with CSS (including CSS paged media for printing) and generate PDFs from it.
Option #1 : Adobe Acrobat is really nice. You can design form enabled PDFs and then use something like PDFSharp to manipulate the PDF document. You can create template PDF's that you dump your generated stuff into. I've done this before and it was pretty successful. I also used POCO objects nicely.
Option #2 : You could start creating XPS documents, which is XML based anyways. And they can be easily converted to PDF if necessary.
Option #3 : Run for your life.(might not be an option)
i-net Clear Reports is a nice product. It's based on Java but you can also work with ASP.NET. There is a bridge. The .NET version is in work if you want work with POCO. Because the Java version can work with POJO that the coming .NET version will also work with POCO.
I work on a collaboration web app, built with Flex 3, that needs to support multiple languages.
Does anyone know which fonts are best for creating embedded font libraries for Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Russian languages? I know Arial Unicode MS will do the job, but I don't know if it will do the job best.
Localization alone won't solve the entire problem: chat input and display, for example, need to support multiple languages in the same textfield - anything typed in Chinese needs to display in Chinese; anything typed in English needs to display in English.
Using _sans is an option, but is far from preferred.
Thanks.
Went with an approach that switches TextFormat of characters based on unicode value. So, characters in the primary language display in the preferred (embedded) font, while characters in other languages display in _sans.
This works out really nicely, but requires that you inspect every character that is added to a field, and requires you to inspect everything when a deletion occurs. Kind of a lot of inspecting and I'm sure a textfield with a lot of content would start running into performance issues, but this is for a chat tool, so that isn't too critical of a use case.