TMG-L Archives

Archiver > TMG > 2001-10 > 1003250155


From: "Richard J. Otter" <>
Subject: RE: [TMG] Multi Language Support
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 09:35:55 -0700
In-Reply-To: <4.2.2.20011015223009.01842da8@pop3.norton.antivirus>


Please correct me if I'm wrong, but 16 bit apps, and 32 bit apps that are
not compiled for Unicode, have access to 256 possible characters in a font.
The choice of which 256 characters are in the font is set by the codepage,
which is set using the language control panel.
The point is that while you can set you local language to anything you want,
mixing languages may not work.
Sure, most western european languages and English can be expressed with the
Latin-1 codepage, but try getting Russian Cyrilic characters and Araabic to
print on the same page. Perhaps some non-Unicode apps have managed to do
this,I'd be interested in how.
I think that only an app that supports Unicode can claim to have true
multi-lanhguage support.

Any comments?
Richard Otter

-----Original Message-----
From: Lee Hoffman [mailto:]
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 7:48 PM
To:
Subject: Re: [TMG] Multi Language Support


David Walker wrote:
>I have a friend of Chinese origin who is interested in purchasing a
>genealogy product that will support Chinese characters.
>
>Does TMG 4.0d have multi language support, ie. input of specific foreign
>characters?

Hmm! In regard to the question in general, yes, TMG can accept data in
languages other than English including those with foreign
characters. This includes such languages as German, French, Norwegian,
Finnish, Dutch and the special characters that may be in those
languages. However, these are language in which a word may have from one
to many characters in it.

I do not know of anyone who has created a Language Translation Table for
Chinese. As I understand it, the Chinese language is made up of ideographs
(characters of a sort) -- each of which represents a word. That is, one
ideograph may represent a word which (in English) has three letters, while
another Chinese ideograph may represent a word which has ten English
letters. In such a case, I don't think TMG could really work well.

Having said this, I am vaguely aware that there may be some set of Chinese
characters (language) for computers/printing that may be somewhat
comparable to those of English. I know that the Japanese language has
this. If this is so for Chinese, and if it is usable with Windows (e.g.,
has a Code Page), then TMG may very well work with it. To make sure, one
would have to try it out and see.

I suggest that you contact Tech Support to see if they know of any users
that have done this.

Hope this helps -

----------
Lee Hoffman/KY
E-mail:
TMG Tips: <http://www.tmgtips.com>;
My website: <http://www.tmgtips.com/lhoffman>;
--------------
A user of the best genealogy program, The Master Genealogist (TMG)

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