>did you ever notice that the choice of measurement systems in >Windows regional systems is restricted to metric or US. >you don't get a choice of say, UK Imperial,
Microsoft Windows XP has many different regional variations chosen after language. There are: 13 English 6 French 5 German 2 Portugese 19 Spanish The good news is... Metric: English (Australia) English (Belize) English (Canada) English (Ireland) English (New Zealand) English (South Africa) English (Trinidad) English (United Kingdom) Microsoft uses the term 'U.S.' for the non-metric option. The following countries are shown as U.S. units: English (Caribbean) English (Jamaica) English (Philippines) English (United States) English (Zimbabwe) As an aside, Microsoft dominance of interface design has caused me some problems in the past because it uses the US convention of using upper case more than is normal in other countries. For example 'headline case' is used for titles rather than 'sentence case'. It would be tolerable, although still culturally alien if they used 'word case' throughout. It is almost impossible to come up with universal consistency rules for headline case for sub-editors, software engineers and translators. Microsoft products suffer just as much from this as newspapers do. Word or headline case also eliminates the ability to use upper case to distinguish proper nouns such as 'orange' (the fruit or colour) and 'Orange' the phone company. It cost my client quite a lot of money (some of it on me happily!) and time attempting to audit and design around this until we gave up trying and reverted to sentence case as was appropriate for the client cultures. The BBC uses sentence case: http://news.bbc.co.uk The Washington post uses headline case: http://www.washingtonpost.com -- Terry Simpson Human Factors Consultant [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.connected-systems.com Phone: +44 7850 511794
