hands
on
The
multilingual Mac
Michael Vallance
Jul 11, 2001
An IT ‘specialist’ recently stated in my presence that Macs
could not read Chinese characters and are of no use for foreign languages.
This
couldn’t be further from the truth. Several languages have been supported
by Apple for many years and I recall Japanese OS 7.5 for Mac (KanjiTalk)
being released at the same time as the English version way back in 1994
when my Japanese wife started using the language kit on our Macs to type
English and Japanese. Since upgrading her iMac to OS 9 she now reads Japanese
news online, emails her sister’s DoCoMo handphone, and translates
documents in Office 2001.
OS 9 has integrated over 20 languages such as French, German, Spanish,
Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and
many more, all free, but these are not installed by default.
If you wish to read, for example, Chinese web pages or type Chinese text
yet maintain an English operating system, simply insert your OS 9 CD.
Restart your Mac while holding down the C key. Then under Customisation
select Language Kits and check the languages you wish to install. Finally,
click the Install button. When finished, restart your Mac.
At the top of your desktop you will see a flag indicating which font type
is currently active (Union Jack for British, etc). You can now select
your character set and type away. You can also select the language options
by going to the Control Panels and selecting Keyboard. Here you will see
all the options currently installed on your Mac.
Before typing it is advisable to print out the Key Caps (accessible from
the Apple menu) as this will allow first timers to get used to the associated
keyboard. When Noriko (yes, my wife) types a Japanese sentence such as
Watashi wa shokuji no toki ni hashi o tsukaimasu (I use chopsticks when
I eat meals), the simplified hiragana characters are automatically converted
to kanji characters after pressing the space bar at the end of the sentence.
Occasionally a Japanese word may have different meanings therefore different
kanji. For example, hashi can mean bridge or chopsticks. The Mac automatically
provides a selection in the form of a drop down menu. Once the correct
character has been selected the Mac remembers this for future similar
contexts.
.
If you wish to read non-English websites on your Mac then Internet Explorer
5 will automatically detect the fonts used by the web pages if you select
the ‘Allow page to specify fonts’ button under Preferences,
Web Content.
Versatile OS 9 will also allow foreign language text scanning and also
text to speech. Two comprehensive web sites are the Chinese Mac web site
(http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/)
and MacLanguages (http://homepage.mac.com/mac_languages/).
Also try Apple’s web pages such as www.apple.com.tw for more detailed
support and information.
How about OS X? According to Eric Rasmussen and Erik Sahlin at the Chinese
Mac web site:
“When you install OS X, you are provided with full Japanese-language
support, with extended Japanese fonts (according to Apple, the fonts contain
"over 15,000" Japanese characters) and Kotoeri, the Japanese
input method. There are no Chinese fonts that come with OS X version 10.0,
nor any functioning Chinese input methods. They are due to be released
this summer. Nonetheless, OS X searches your OS 9.1 System: Fonts folder
and makes all the fonts in it available in OS X. As a result, if you have
installed the Chinese language kits in OS 9.1, then you are able to read
Chinese web pages and e-mails in OS X, as well as handle Chinese text--you
just can't input Chinese directly.”
Apple’s Greg Dauphin commented by e-mail, “No language kits
are necessary in OSX as we will be building the languages directly into
the OS.” The multilingual Mac.
Apple continues to surprise us and the installation of OSX on all new
Apple computers two months ahead of schedule testify to their commitment
so expect OS X Chinese support soon. Until such time, OS 9 will have to
suffice. If you have any further advice for using non-English text on
Macs, why not write to us?
Michael Vallance is from the Mac Users Group of Singapore. Its website is at www.macuser.org.sg