--- Forwarded Message from [log in to unmask] (David Herren) ---

>From: [log in to unmask] (David Herren)
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Cc: [log in to unmask]
>Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 15:39:43 -0500
>Subject: Re: #4837.8 Apple Language Kits (!) and OS 8.5
>References: <[log in to unmask]>
>Organization: Center for Educational Technology

[log in to unmask] writes:
>I decided to install multilingual access on my upgraded development machine.
>First of all,  I wish this capability had not been so hidden in the OS
>install.  Still, at least it is there.

I wouldn't exactly call the "custom" installation hidden. Custom installs have been around for years and on many platforms...remember most people doing installations don't exactly need to surf Korean web sites, so of course this would be a custom install.
 ;-)

For "hidden" fun, try to find and remember all the steps necessary to install the international keyboard under NT...

>However, what I discovered is that ALL of the East Asian language fonts
>are for display only.  Thus Korean, Chinese, and Japanese fonts are for
>display only.  Thus only the Middle Eastern languages and Indian languages
>include the fonts that work with word processing programs like Word 98
>(although that capability is still way cool; I had great fun typing
>in Hebrew, Arabic, and Hindi and seeing a WYSIWYG printout).  So, this
>does not obviate the need for the East Asian language kits.

You'll recall that I did mention that there were no input methods for the CJK (Steve Smolnik kindly reminded me that I used an acronym without defining it in my earlier message. CJK stands for "Chinese/Japanese/Korean"). So yes, the 8.5 installation is
for display only--you cannot "input" text. For that, you would need the CJK kits.

>Secondly, I was disturbed to find that these fonts were still not
>recognized by many pages on the net and discovered that trying to tweak
>the font settings crashed Netscape 4.5 (although not IE 4.0).

Fonts are never "recognized" by web browsers, but any good foreign language page should include a character set tag in the header instructing the browser which set to use to display the page in question. Not the fault of the kits, but of the page author.
You can simply tell the browser manually which encoding to use for a particular page--you do not want or need to make any "font" changes in the preferences--just change the encoding (in Netscape, this in the "View" menu under the "Encoding" sub-menu. Of
course you'll have to know which encoding the page author used if they didn't create the page properly and include the charset tags...)

For excellent information on the tags necessary to instruct a browser to switch encodings, see my colleague Robert Smitheram's pages at (note case of the "S" is important):

http://cet.middlebury.edu/Smitheram/charset/charset.html

>So, I guess we will wait for full unicode implementation in OSX and
>Win2000 while making do for now with kits.

Well, for more information about Unicode, you can also see Robert Smitheram's pages. As MacOS X and WindowsNT developers, we work in Unicode every day:

http://cet.middlebury.edu/Smitheram/otherDocs/configure.html
http://cet.middlebury.edu/Smitheram/otherDocs/UTF8.html
http://cet.middlebury.edu/Smitheram/otherDocs/nonUTF8.html

-- 
David D. Herren                          www.cet.middlebury.edu/herren
Assoc. Dir. for Tech. & Instruction      [log in to unmask]
Center for Educational Technology                 voice: (802)443-5746
5 Court Street, Middlebury, VT 05753                fax: (802)443-2053