One of the biggest existing problems for international users and international companies is the difficulty of displaying web pages written in multiple languages. This thesis project demonstrates a solution in which the problems of text encoding are eliminated by representing all of the text on a page as a series of image files. The Japanese text on several Japanese web pages was converted into glyphs, which were defined as image files containing images of text. The glyphs were arranged on new web pages, so that the same Japanese text can be read by any web surfer, regardless of the operating system or fonts available on his or her computer. Statistics are given to demonstrate that the proposed method can be used to generate glyph-based web pages quickly, that glyphs can be downloaded more quickly than other types of graphics (e.g. photographs and computer animation), that users with Japanese-language software on their computers find no significant difference between the text-based and glyph-based web pages, and that users without Japanese-language software were able to view the glyph-based web pages in Japanese. The new web pages are available for public download, at http://www.kcg.edu/event2 (GIF glyphs) and http://www.kcg.edu/event3 (JPEG glyphs)
