No subject

[josh at saratoga.lib.ny.us]

I'd like to know the easiest way to set up NetScape (and/or MSIE) so
they will work for other linguistic communities. I have had requests
or know that there have been people in the library who might wish to
browse pages in Russian, Hindi, Chinese, and Hebrew. I also know we
get speakers of languages using the same alphabet, but that the web
pages in French and Spanish do not always display correctly. I would
like it if anyone sitting down who spoke a foreign language could
browse web pages in that language. Since I have NetScape set with the
us-english default settings in this library, I know I am far away from
this.

The incident described here is what has prompted my search.  I
received a request to "download Yahoo's program to enable viewing
Chinese." At http://chinese.yahoo.com/docs/info/download.html there
are instructions saying that everything will work fine with MSIE. (Of
course this makes me wonder if MSIE got it right while NetScape didn't
or if MicroSoft payed off someone at Yahoo) At the bottom there are
some links saying you can get needed software there. I went to the
first link http://www.njstar.com/ which seem to be selling a wide
variety of tools for Asian languages, but nothing specifically for
free to enable web browsing in Chinese with NetScape.

I thought I could just download the font and enable the language in
NetScape's language preferences. It seems to take more than
that. While I will be thrilled with a simple solution for my immediate
problem - I need a pointer to a tutorial on configuring public use web
browsers for use by linguistically diverse groups.

-- 
Josh Kuperman                       josh at saratoga.lib.ny.us
Saratoga Springs Public Library     phone (518) 584-7860 x 211
49 Henry St                         fax   (518) 584-7866
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866