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From: duggie@Jessica.stanford.edu (Doug Felt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Foriegn markets and Languages
Message-ID: <2136@Portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 9 May 89 00:52:25 GMT
References: <10459@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
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Reply-To: duggie@Jessica.stanford.edu (Doug Felt)
Organization: Stanford University
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In addition, NeXT has not attempted to tackle the significant problems
of handling languages like Chinese (very large number of ideographs),
Japanese (mixed writing wsystems), Hebrew (right to left text), or
Arabic languages (variable letter forms).  Apple has incorporated
basic routines for handing different "scripts" into its toolbox, and
is slowly making progress towards a truly multilingual computer (new
versions of TextEdit will handle multiple scripts within the same body
of text).  In particular, Apple has system software that allows
ordinary macs to use any of the above mentioned languages (although
some word-processing software written without using the recent toolbox
routines is not completely compatible).

I was disappointed that NeXT did not share the same goals.  While the
problems of providing large character sets in postscript are not
trivial, and perhaps postscript fonts for some of these languages
still do not exist, I think an early effort to support multibyte
character sets would have been worthwhile.  Just as working in
grayscale eases the transition to color, working with multibyte fonts
would ease the transition to multilingual user interfaces.  As it is
it looks to be a long time coming.

Doug Felt