Hey James,
being eu-based means we are super sensible to localization needs. Sparkle itself is translated to 7 languages and we plan on translating the site and manual as well as resources allow.
Sparkle has no problem with multi language sites but doesn’t yet have any special support for them, though we do have several customers using sparkle that way. Sparkle could facilitate it in several ways, we are saving design ideas for a time when we can add a bunch of things all at once and make a big push. We definitely can discuss the current options offline if you want.
Regarding CJK languages there are a couple issues and in general the problems aren’t very well understood outside of user groups who actively use them.
The first and most obvious is how text is encoded in pages. Sparkle can encode both UTF-8 text and pure ascii, the latter is for servers that force a charset in the headers, which break UTF-8. By using Sparkle’s built in publishing this will soon be auto detected and work with no user intervention.
The second is fonts. As you note webfonts are pretty rare because of the sheer number of glyphs. It seems to all boils down to using the proper CSS font stack, which you can do in the Sparkle system font pane. There are a few built in stacks including for common Japanese fonts, but you can change them and add fonts.
As long as you don’t mix Chinese, Japanese and Korean the current Sparkle setup works fine. If you do need to mix them then it’s no longer sufficient because the same character code point maps to different glyphs or similar glyphs but drawn with different strokes. To fix that the “lang” attribute need to be set on the page or on individual paragraphs. Sparkle doesn’t yet support it but we are fully aware and hope to get around to it soon.
Does this answer your question?
Duncan
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