--- Forwarded Message from Mike Ledgerwood <[log in to unmask]> ---

>Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 11:30:56 -0500
>From: Mike Ledgerwood <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: #4837.2 Apple Language Kits (!) and OS 8.5
>In-reply-to: <[log in to unmask]>
>To: Language Learning and Technology International Information Forum <[log in to unmask]>

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I did have to add one thing to what David wrote.  If I am wrong in what I
write, please correct me!

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.

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.

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).

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

BEST to all, Mike

P.S. I could have done a commericial for Apple last Friday.  I had 12 girl
scouts visit my Center to do a computer badge.  They had to install programs,
start them and then trash the install.  I showed them how to do this with
both OS 8 and Win 95.  2/3 of the girls have Windows machines at home and
have  used them at home.  When they went into my mixed platform lab, 4/5 of
the
girls started with Win computers to do the work for the badge.  After 30
minutes only one girl was not on a Mac.  :)



So, my feeling is that there is still work to be done.  Nevertheless
this capability goes far beyond Win98's.