Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!usc!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!auriga!altair!boyle
From: boyle@altair.mcs.anl.gov
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Non-English support
Message-ID: <4000005@altair>
Date: 19 Dec 89 17:38:57 GMT
References: <130053@gore.com>
Lines: 35
Nf-ID: #R:gore.com:130053:altair:4000005:000:1821
Nf-From: altair.mcs.anl.gov!boyle    Dec 18 13:50:00 1989


/* Written  5:40 pm  Dec 17, 1989 by g2k@mentor.cc.purdue.edu in altair:comp.sys.next */

I am amazed about the reaction of some persons when it comes to claim the basics
foreign characters on the NeXT. How can people be so intolerant, or ignorant
[...]  Hey, what would you say if you had to write english whithout h, x, y,
w letters ? Having to replace x by ks, y by ii, w by v ? [...]  Being European,
each time I have to write a report in my native language, I have to take the
old Mac which at least provides the basic combinations of letters and accents.
America is not the world; be sure that until NeXT implements the accents on
its machines, NeXT won't sell a single machine outside the scientific comunity
in the continental EEC.

To conquer the non-scientific users in Europe, NeXT MUST have accents working on
its machines. Until then, Mac will be the preferred choice of these users. [...]

Frederic
/* End of text from altair:comp.sys.next */

Well, the situation in regard to European languages that use variants
of the Roman alphabet is not quite hopeless.  If you look at the
appendices of the NeXT User's Reference Manual, it shows how to type
the various accent marks (including those needed for French, umlauts
for German, the es-set (?... means "ss" and looks like Greek beta),
Polish slashed l's, dot-less "i" needed to combine with umlaut dots to
correctly spell "naive" in English, etc.  The manual says that the
accent marks are supposed to print over or under the preceding character,
but print after them in applications that don't yet support them.
WriteNow prints them after the character, so I guess support isn't in
1.0, but things like the AE ligature and o-slash for the Scandanavian
langugaes already work (including on the NeXT printer).

Sorry I can't include a sample :-).

Jim Boyle