No promised land yet for multilingual PCs
I use a Macintosh and Mac OS X with Microsoft Office. Most of my work is done in English but I sometimes get Word files from users on the Windows platform with Chinese text. When I open these files on my Mac, the English text is fine, but the Chinese is odd. Chinese characters appear underlined. In fact, if I did not know it was meant to be Chinese, I would not even know anything was missing. How can I read the Chinese?
Also, will Microsoft produce a product on Mac that will handle Chinese and other double-byte languages in future?
Name and address supplied Mid-Levels
For those of us who have always wanted a computer system that handles many languages easily, we have not yet arrived in the Promised Land.
There is much to be said about Linux (and Unix), Apple's Mac OS?X and Microsoft's Windows. None of these operating systems, however, is a clear winner when it comes to handling multiple languages.
Both Microsoft and Apple have done a lot to make it easier to use different languages, but there are still problems, some of which are due to the way the operating systems handle things and others due to the way applications behave.
In an ideal world, the OS would handle everything and the applications would simply hook into it and display the fonts perfectly. We do not live in an ideal world, of course. Apple has done a somewhat better job in handling fonts, and that explains why it is still the platform of choice for most desktop publishing. On the other hand, Microsoft easily has the best Chinese-language input system created so far, in that it handles both simplified and traditional characters with ease. Apple has an excellent simplified characters system, but the traditional one leaves much to be desired.
Once the text has been input, however, things can get funny. On the Windows platform, Microsoft handles everything rather well, so long as you only use Microsoft products on the same platform.
I spoke to Microsoft in Hong Kong and they said they would release a major update to the Office product on the Mac later this year and that it would be fully Unicode compliant. This is excellent news.
In the meantime, a reasonable solution for normal files (but not large, book-length files) is Nisus Writer Express, which has been updated for Mac OS X. A demo version can be downloaded, and I have tested it with files of mixed languages and it works extremely well. I opened a Microsoft Word file that had both English and Chinese in it and Nisus read it without a problem. I also opened a large file of book length, but the response was quite sluggish. The Chinese characters were still visible but trying to move around the file was difficult. To handle a book though, you could split it up into a file for each chapter.
