>The general question is: what I need to do to be able to display Asian
>(Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, etc) and European (Russian, etc) in both
>platforms (Macintosh and Windows)?
Theo,
That's a broad subject--I'll see what I can do in a few paragraphs.
You can use English, French, or German Director to display most Western
European languages. It's missing some characters for some Scandinavian
languages, but you're good in English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch,
Italian, Portuguese, etc.
The projector will run on just about any system--computers started in the
West, and retain their Western bias. I recommend you embed all your fonts,
though.
To develop for Asian languages, specifically Chinese (S), Chinese (T),
Korean, and Japanese, you will need the Japanese version of Director. Build
your Chinese projector on a Chinese-enabled system, Korean on a
Korean-enabled system, and so on.
There are a couple ways to get an Asian system--for simplicity, I'll use
Japanese. For Apple, you buy the Japanese system, or the Japanese Language
Kit. On Windows, you can get Japanese Windows, or you can buy an add-in
like Twin Bridge, which gives your system Japanese capabilities (and,
coincidentally, Chinese and Korean).
Regardless of how you make the projector, though, it will *not* run on
European-language systems unless you convert the text to bitmaps. The
encoding system for CCJK is just too different to be compatible (for now,
at least, until Unicode is more widely accepted). Because of the thousands
of characters in those languages, they use a multibyte encoding system
(often mistakenly referred to as "double-byte"). Only Asian systems are
capable of handling that encoding.
As to other languages such as Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Czech, Cyrillic, and
the like, you're unfortunately out of luck. You would have to hack a font
that conforms to ISO 8859.1 standards, uses the right Windows code page,
etc., and embed it. Still, you would be out of luck on input.
Interestingly, some less widespread languages like Lao, Khmer, Burmese, and
Tibetan have adopted fonts that will work on an English system, though
again you need to embed them.
As the computer world stands now, it is a tower of babel. Unicode will go a
long way towards fixing that, though it only addresses characters, not mode
(vertical, right-to-left, bi-directional).
Of course, once you get beyond the linguistic issues, you have to deal with
cultural and geographic issues such as date and time format, decimal and
thousands separators, currency, and the like. These can vary within a
language--French-speaking Canadians use dollars, while European French use
francs.
For more specific information, I advise you check out Nadine Kano's latest
book--she's written a series on localization for Windows. It's a treasure
trove of information.
Cordially,
Kerry Thompson
Learning Network
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