svc@well.UUCP (Leonard Rosenthol) (10/09/89)
In article <1884@draken.nada.kth.se> ianf@nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman) writes: >In article <4360@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> ar4@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Piper Keairnes) writes: >>>> [ discussion of Red Ryder 11.0] > > Now, apply the REAL lithmus test to it - does it work with non-USASCII > character sets? Any Macintosh-program ought to. If it doesn't then > it can't be well written... > > PS. I can send you the necessary Swedish character-set resources to > put in your system/ remap you keyboard for you to find out. If it > does work with these it should accept also other languages. > Wow! Someone else in the world who understands the needs of the international user (and it not just because he's from Sweden :-). Since you brought it up, let me put my two cents in on this issue. We gave A LOT of thought around here to how to properly make MicroPhone II v3.0 internationally compatible and usable and we address it in three ways. (NOTE: Due to the complexities of Script Manager compatability in Communications we are NOT Script Manager compatabile but ARE Internationally compatible. This means that any roman based langauge can/is supported but languages such as Kanji or Hebrew is not. If you would like to know why supporting those is NOT trivial, feel free to ask!) 1) Support for the chosen date and time formats. This one was pretty obvoius and ANY Mac program that doesn't do this should be shot! (oh, by chosen I mean the one defined by the intl/itlx resources in the system)./ 2) Support for international scripting and comparisions. You can now use international characters in the scripting language for such things as dialog displays, comparisons on incoming and/or static text, etc. 3) Support for display and translation of international characters and foreign transmission codes. Unlike other communications packages which simply give you a choice of 'foreign keyboards', MPII v3.0 gives you a choice of what we call 'Character Sets'. You can choose from the sets that we provide or we include a complete charSet editor so you can create your own translation sets or modify the ones we supply. This means that if, for example, you are in part of Sweden where they do somethign differently than the rest of Sweden, you can simply apply the changes to our Swedish Set and you're in business. Since you can create your own sets, they can be used for things other than Int'l sets. We have one example where you can use the high-end ASCII chars to do a Show CTRL Chars mode, etc. Briefly the way a CharSet works is that you set up a mapping of one ASCII value to another. This means that when MPII v3.0 sees a char with ASCII value x it will change the character to ASCII value y. We have been doing testing with many international users in France, Canada, Sweden and Finland and they are quite happy with our implementation. if anybody has any questions about our Int'l support, please ask! Leonard Rosenthol Software Ventures MicroPhone II Development Team -- +--------------------------------------------------+ Leonard Rosenthol | GEnie : MACgician Lazerware, inc. | MacNet: MACgician UUCP: svc@well.UUCP | ALink : D0025
minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow) (10/10/89)
In article <14008@well.UUCP> svc@well.UUCP (Leonard Rosenthol) writes: > Wow! Someone else in the world who understands the needs of the >international user (and it not just because he's from Sweden :-). Well, I used to be from Sweden, and my terminal emulator supports Latin-1, Latin-8 (Hebrew) and whatever else I need in my own work. [It's not publically available.] > This >means that any roman based langauge can/is supported but languages such as >Kanji or Hebrew is not. If you would like to know why supporting those is NOT >trivial, feel free to ask!) Hebrew (ISO Latin-8 + Dec VT... Hebrew escape sequences) is fairly simple to support (adding it to my terminal emulator took about 2 evenings). Compared to supporting mouse selection, it was quite trivial. The problems I see in supporting International Character Sets aren't with the user-interface (and scripts) but with the Macintosh native character set itself. There is no reasonable way to map between the Macintosh character set and the existing international standards (ISO 8859 Latin-x). This problem will only get worse over the next several years as ISO 10646 takes shape, and Apple's recently described extensions haven't helped matters any. Martin Minow minow@thundr.enet.dec.com