[WinMac] Re: Multilingual support for Scandinavian languages & Russian in Win98

thomas kase(thomas[at]accessio.com)
Mon, 04 Jan 1999 21:05:53 -0500

> > Brian Durant wrote:
> > I am a Mac user switching to Windows 98. I need some advice on how to setup
> > multilingual support for Scandinavian languages and Russian using the US
> > version of Windows 98.

> Bruce Johnson wrote:
> No need for any shareware program...just make sure that the Character Map
> accessory program is installed. This is essentially KeyCaps for windows, but
> also, clicking on each character will show you the keyboard equivalent to
> produce that character. Most of the extended characters are Alt+<number>
> combinations. Note: you _have_ to use the numbers on the _keypad_ for this to
> work, at least in Win95.
>
> As for fonts supporting these languages, the Scandanavian languages are
> covered by the Western ISO encoding in most Windows TrueType fonts, and
> Russian fonts are readily available, both as shareware and freeware. All the
> major font producers (Adobe, Linotype, Bitstream, etc) make Cyrillic fonts,
> and browsing someplace like Winsite (www.winsite.com) will turn up shareware
> and freeware ones.
>
> Basically, so long as you only want to _write_ in Cyrillic or Scandanavian
> everything should be simple, and work out of the box.

Sorry to say this but, from a useability point of view the Character Map program
can only get the typical Nice Try (NT) mark. No cigar.

Not only do I use Japanese (which relies on a different IME altogether), but as
a speaker (and writer) of several European languages requiring non-English
characters I can only say that Windows does not cut it in this area.

With the Mac you can use *realistic* shortcuts will result in the right accents
or macrons added to the following character. Examples, option+u adds two dots
(aka umlaut) to the following character typed, option+e adds an accent acute
to the following character typed.

I'd LOVE to have this ease of use on NT as well - as I said, the ALT+(4-letter)
code combo just isn't anywhere near as helpful as Key Caps. It's more like a
cruel joke from programmers with too many jargot memorized.

Key Caps by the way gives you a keyboard layout where you can SEE what happens
when you key a particular combination - WYSIWYG! - and IMHO, Character Map
is nothing like Key Caps.

If there's a shareware program for Windows that can give me the ease-of-use that
the Mac offers in this area, I'd love to find out.

Next, how to solve the issue of Windows not recognizing which character set to use
on the fly? ICQ from Germans or Scandinavians always appears garbled on my end,
regardless of what I do - other applications have the same problems. This is never
an issue on the Mac.

Thomas Kase

  accessio.com inc., 33 south main street, #7, south norwalk, ct 06854
  phone: 203.866.4454 fax: 203.866.4546
  email: thomas@accessio.com

\\\\ the bridge to Japan (TM) \\\\

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Mon Jan 04 1999 - 18:08:57 PST