TITLE
    Mac OS 9: What's New - Multilingual Internet Access 2.0 and Language Kits
Article ID:
Created:
Modified: 		60521
9/30/99
10/20/99
TOPIC

    Multilingual Internet Access is the software that allows you to view and edit text in WorldScript-aware applications from one or more of the following language families: Arabic (Arabic and Persian), Cyrillic (Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian), Central European (Polish, Hungarian, Czech), Indic (Devanagari, Gujarati, and Gurmukhi), Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese.

DISCUSSION

    Mac OS 9 adds an input method for each of Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese languages. An input method refers to a way to use a keyboard with 26 (or so) letters to enter characters in a character-based language that may have thousands of characters.
    • New language scripts are supported with this version.
    • The Cyrillic Language Kit supports Bulgarian, Russian, and Ukrainian.
    • The Central European (CE) Language Kit supports Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak.

    Language Kits
    A language kit is a product that allows you to type text in languages which do not use the Roman alphabet using English (or other Roman) keyboards and Mac OS versions. Instead of the 26 (or so) characters that Roman alphabets use, non-Roman alphabets use other alphabets or character sets of many thousands of characters.

    Apple includes the latest versions of each language kit in Mac OS 9.

    As of Mac OS 9, the following language kit-specific extensions are no longer necessary: Language Kit Extension and WorldScript II. Note that the WorldScript I extension is still installed (and needed).

    The Language Kit CD Extras folder on the Mac OS 9 CD includes extra fonts for each language kit and a version of SimpleText for that works with that language kit.

    What a language kit does not do
    • A language kit does not translate between languages.
    • A language kit does not change the language that your system software uses.
    • A language kit does not enable speech recognition or text to speech in other languages.

    In order to be able to use a language kit, you need an application that can deal with languages that use non-roman characters, right-to-left word order and other features. Apple's system-level technology to make this easy is called WorldScript. Applications that make use of WorldScript are called WorldScript-savvy applications. You need WorldScript-savvy applications for Language Kits to work.

    DO NOT install older versions of language kit on Mac OS 9.

Document Information
Product Area: Mac OS System Software
Category: Mac OS 9.0
Sub Category: System Software Components

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