Hello, Alastair.
On Wed, 27 Feb 2002 20:40:27 +0000 GMT your local time, which was
Wednesday, February 27, 2002, 1:40 PM -0700 GMT here,
you wrote:
> From what you say you can buy a third-party application which hooks
> into the Windows APIs so allows _any_ Windows application to accept
> such character sets ... true?
Well, more or less. It works better with some applications than with
others.
> If so, what's the point of writing (for example) a 'Japanese Bat!'?
> Rather than the TB! authors (of whom there are not many, something
> which some people here forget) running themselves ragged trying to
> support multiple languages, why not direct people to such
> applications?
Several reasons:
1. As indicated above, it's only a partial solution.
2. The competition supports CJK WITHOUT the necessity of third-party
software. Microsoft supports both display and input; Becky supports
display (I'm not sure about input).
3. It's very expensive. I spent over $100 US to buy NJStar
Communicator. And it's cheap compared to the competition. A few
years ago, I bought TwinBridge's Korean Partner for $80 (1/2 price,
but I had to go to Korea to get it at that price). It supported only
Korean (no Chinese or Japanese), and when I upgraded to XP, it
broke. So there goes another $100. If I used Outlook or OE, I would
have saved not just the expense of The Bat!, but this $180 as
well. That's an expensive email client.
4. Some people really do need it. See Yuki's earlier post that
started this thread. I only occasionally need CJK capabilities,
but she needs them all the time. Without that support, RIT Labs will lose a
customer--and many more.
As far as I'm concerned, The Bat! and Becky! are very similar
products. A couple of years ago, when I was trying to decide between
the two, I almost chose Becky because of its CJK support alone. The
only reason I didn't was that I like the online community a lot
better here than there. For many others who need CJK, the difference
between $30 and $130 (or free and $130) will make for an easy
decision.
> (The whole issue is particularly odd when I think that this approach,
> when anyone with language and typographical skills could write a
> supporting package for any language which hooked seamlessly into the
> OS, was solved by Apple in MacOS a good 10 years ago :)
You make it sound easy ;-).
--
Keith Russell
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
...Half the lies they tell me aren't true. --Yogi Berra
--
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