[Web4lib] Multiple Languages for IE7

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, Andrew wrote:

> Thomas,
> 
> I just went through this exercise on our public computers running IE 7 on
> Windows XP:
> 
> http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/handson/user/xpintlsupp.mspx
> 
> Since I'm supporting a lot less than 500 computers, I did this manually. I
> think what you want to explore is the Multilingual User Interface feature from
> MS:
> 
> http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/MUIFaq.mspx

A critical differentiation here: the MUI feature is about adding 
multilingual Windows menus, dialog boxes, and other user interface items 
to a system. This would allow a Chinese user, for instance, to have 
Chinese menus. This is NOT necessary for IE to display Chinese.

The technique I posted is enough to allow display and printing of Far East 
characters (subject, as you point out, to policy/lockdown restrictions). 
Another step that may be needed is installation of Input Method Editors 
(IMEs), which are needed if a user wants to use the keyboard to type in 
CJK characters.

If you want to be REALLY thorough, you could take additional steps:

1) Input tablets and character recognition software to allow users to 
hand-write their CJK characters. I believe all needed software is now 
provided by Windows, although some elements of MS Office may be required, 
I'm not sure. This is the setup I saw in a public library in Hong Kong a 
few years ago, on PCs available to the public. Keyboards were tucked away.

2) Chinese (e.g.) text-to-speech. 

3) Chinese (e.g.) speech recognition.

But then your library might get noisy...

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
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