Re: Article on Hebrew support...

[Eric Hildum]

Title: Re: Article on Hebrew support...

I have received several private email on this subject. I am concerned about a number of them, which reflect in my view a fundamental misunderstanding of the true issues involved. Unfortunately, the Register article contains both technical inaccuracies and unsubstantiated rumors which obscure the true situation being described.

In particular, the level of language support in the Office products has improved very substantially in the last several years. When the Office products were truly ports of the Windows code, the multilanguage support was nonexistent. With the MBU’s move to a native Macintosh code base using the OS language support this changed dramatically; for example, most of the old double byte language problems were resolved. As the code base is migrated from MacOS 9 to OS X, I expect to see further improvements. Note that the Register’s claim that support of Hebrew, Arabic, and Korean is trivial is incorrect. In the case of Hebrew, which is a right to left language, localization requires more work than the Register indicates in the article. As one case, consider the implications of alignment or selection on a mixed text containing both left to right and right to left text. Further, localization is not a simple matter of funding for one development. There are issues about getting qualified staff both in the localization and the long term support. This is not something where you just bring in a native Hebrew speaker and have at the code once.

I realize that I should have commented further on the article in the original posting; however, I do have a day job...

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Eric Hildum