Le 6/06/02 17:40, ��Mark Mitchell�� <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> a �crit�: > Manuel writes: > But we have had this for near 15 years! I started with a mac 128; when the > 'mac +' popped up, we could parameter the language in the control panel > -------------------- > Not built in to the OS we haven't! (depending on your language.) Right! Of course I meant the alphabetical scripts, and more specially "western european languages". All "western european languages" used to get exactly the same fonts, including all their characters, and the little flag menu allowed to change on the fly, fitting the national keyboard. For another simple-alphabetical language (cyrillic, greek) you had just to put the fonts, and the kchr resources (flag, keyboard mapping etc.). THIS facility, was not always shipped in the US: you had to ask for it
Moreover these fonts also had all the diacriticals needed in almost all the other languages written with the latin alphabet (or in cyrillic, if we are speaking of cyrillic fonts). They were not always accesible from all national keyboards, and they printed as a separate letter. But you could use resEdit to set a "0 onset" so that the diacritcal will print upon the letter, or even use a simple utility as (FontMonger) to create the diacritized chars, give them the ascii value of some unused char, and use resedit, very user-friendly, to make a new ressource (and little flag) for your keyboard. > For Japanese > and other 'difficult' languages cumbersome > 'language kits' were required and they seldom worked very well. Under OSX > you can run, for example, traditional Chinese, > Hebrew and Japanese, (oh, and English of course, and have the main menus in > any one of these languages...) switching between > them with relative ease. I'd like to have seen you attempt that 15 years ago! Are you not confusing macOS X vs macOS and Unicode vs conventional system? With the conventional 1 byte coding you have 256 spots (only 128 in DOS and Windows) which leaves more than 200 hundred possible chars. UNICODE uses TWO bits per char which extends the possibility to over 40000! If your script system is syllabic (katakana / hiragana, devanagari) OR needs a lot of contextual variants for each letter (arabic) OR mixes the two difficulties (tibetan), you need two bytes; and if you use some thousands of ideograms (chinese, kandji) the need is still worse. We are pretty happy that the Phenicians came up with the alphabet!* You can switch between ANY language with macOS using UNICODE. > I repeat, OSX is a multi-lingual marvel. I agree! UNICODE certainly works much better with macOS X than with system 9, and, besides, switching between the menus was impossible. Although I still think that the real multi-lingual marvel was the early mac typing 12 mixable western european languages, with the system, the application and the files fitting in a single floppy: in a 400 bytes one! And with the technology available in 1984 for that matter! Manuel _______ * But Bill Gate's Entourage obliges us to use UNICODE for the Euro symbol (ASCII 219) which we have had in our macs for years and even since the beginning with the symbol "currency" it replaced. And this while HE accepts the $ (36), the � (180) and even the � (163) which is bound to disappear: we are MAD! ;-) _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
