I am not entirely sure the exact context of your comment, so I’ll handle the two possible cases:I'm in OS 10.1.5. US English. I set my language "script" in the language menu to Japanese. I select a folder, click again to select its name and start tying away. I get Japanese characters appearing the same as I would in a text app or Entourage. As soon as I click outside the folder-name-text-field, to save, I get an alert message from the system which tells me that I cannot name the folder to [correct Japanese word] because of the "accented characters". If I try it with Russian or Czech, same thing. I seem to have my International Language System Prefs set correctly, so I don't know what else I should do. I haven't tried pasting, just typing.
I.
In fact, it will, from at least System 7. I’m not sure about earlier than that. For Mac OS 7 through 9.2, you need to change the font used to display the file names to a font for the language you intend to use, e.g., Osaka for Japanese. It is recommended that you choose a fixed (non-porportional) font for this. If I remember correctly, you select the Views control panel to change the font. This will work on both HFS and HFS+ disks. I am not sure what HFS used, but HFS+ disks use Unicode for the file name, in both cases you can name a file anything you like, you just cannot see the names in more than one language (or, more accurately, one language plus English) at a time.
In OS X, (which is the context for my question) the Finder should be able to handle displaying any language simultaneously, but I must admit I have not tried this.
II.
Cut and paste of Japanese text does work as I indicate, but not from Microsoft apps. I’ve just opened a text document (with textedit) and entered some Japanese. I can then cut this text and paste it into the name of a folder without problems. It will not work from the Office applications as far as I can tell, presumably because being older carbon apps, they do not use the updated text support in OS 9 and OS X. This is likely to be a problem for any application that does not use ATSUI or Cocoa text handling.
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Paul Berkowitz
