On three occasions I have had to use Finale for pieces with Japanese text. Unfortunately (at least, last time I checked), that requires a special purchase of a Japanese version of Finale, since my version doesn't support the double-byte characters needed for Japanese. Every other major computer application I have (includine Sibelius) supports Unicode. With Unicode applications, all I have to do is figure out how to input Japanese characters (with a Japanese Input Method Editor), (possibly) download some fonts that support Japanese, and the application just works ... for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Greek, etc.
I imagine Finale has bigger worries (like making Finale work on Mac) than meeting my unusual needs. Until Finale supports Unicode, I will continue to buy each Finale upgrade.
I've sent the following link as a suggestion to MakeMusic on the assumption that it will work fine on the billy box systems Finale supports. For the most part, MacOS X users won't care between native Unicode or ICU because as of Panther, the ICU libraries are included in the OS and can be used by any application. If any Windows users have heard about it (good or bad) I'd be interested in the comments:
<http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/>
I urge anyone who can make use of Unicode to write to support with the request. It's a great advantage.
I've had communication very recently with the Japanese distributor. His plans were to start packaging the Japanese version this week (it uses ShiftJIS). If interested, the contact is a very polite gentleman named Yuki Sakamoto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
Philip Aker http://www.aker.ca
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