[WEB4LIB]

[Charles P. Hobbs]

On Fri, 12 Nov 1999 josh at saratoga.lib.ny.us wrote:

> 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

I just download MSIE 5, asking for all the language packs. Arabic,
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew and Vietnamese, at least, are all
supported. Also, Cyrillic and Greek. No Hindi, though.

Never had problems with other Latin-alphabet languages that I know of
either.

We get a lot of people browsing in Chinese (don't know how they'd enter
information into a Chinese form, search engine, etc.) and it seems to
display ok. Sometimes, though, MSIE won't switch back to the regular Latin
font when moving from a Chinese page to an English page. (No, the English
page doesn't come out in Chinese, but it uses the Latin characters
included within the Chinese font--a little wierd looking because of the
spacing)



> 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
>