Arabic Language Software 4 Macintosh

ON THE MACINTOSH ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________

From: resnick@cogsci.uiuc.edu (Pete Resnick) Newsgroups: bit.software.international SUBJECT: RE: SOFTWARE FOR CHINESE, ARABIC, RUSSIAN.... Date: 27 Jul 93 21:14:05 GMT Reply-To: Organization: Technical University of Brno, Czech Republic

At 6:09 PM 7/21/93 +0200, Kevin Almeida wrote:

I am on the look out for any kind of software preferably for the Apple Mac or even for the IBM (where conversion is possible). Well i need to often type matter in different languages. These are Arabic, Chinese, Russian, French and Spanish. ...Is there software available in the market that allows me to type or convert English characters into any of the abovementioned languages ?

This is relatively easy on the Macintosh. You will need to get a couple of things.

a) A word-processor that is Macintosh WorldScript aware. That is, you need a word-processor that fully supports the Macintosh OS calls for different language systems. The one that I know about is Nisus; there is a limited version which only supports English and a full version that supports all Macintosh WorldScript calls.

b) The WorldScript "script" modules for the Mac. This one is a little trickier because Apple has only officially released the Japanese and English script systems here in the US. Fortunately, all of the script systems are available on the Apple Developer CD series. Since you are at KSU, I am sure that you can find someone there who has the Developer CD series. All of the language systems you mention (Arabic, Chinese, Russian, French and Spanish) are available on that disk in addition to many others.

With a WorldScript-aware application like Nisus and all of the appropriate script modules installed, typing in multiple languages is simply a matter of choosing the current language system from a menu. Doing so will switch to the correct font for the language (as in Russian), change the writing direction (switching to right-to-left input for Arabic), change the input method from single-byte to double-byte (as in Chinese), and dealing with other things like ligatures in Arabic and keyboard mappings.

pr

-- Pete Resnick (...so what is a mojo, and why would one be rising?) Graduate assistant - Philosophy Department, Gregory Hall, UIUC System manager - Cognitive Science Group, Beckman Institute, UIUC Internet: resnick@cogsci.uiuc.edu