Greek to you and to me as well
Posted by sub
on 3/15/2005
sub
3/15/2005 7:28 am
Just a short note reminding everyone having English as a working language to be grateful for it; it's amazing how, after so many years of international PC use, there remains software useless for people requiring anything other but the plain latin alphabet.
The latest software that failed my expectations is Zoot, which quite simply refuses to display Greek characters instead of gibberish, even though the Greek script of fonts is selected by default. I imagine it's got something to do with it being a 16-bit application, but others of the same gender work OK.
I admit that the Greek software market is not significant for software vendors outside the EU; but I don't think Greek is the only affected language. What about the Cyrillic alphabet, used in most of Eastern Europe including Russia? What about the growing Chinese market?
It is not surprising that the _only_ two competent Outlook mail client alternatives properly displaying Greek in Unicode, ISO and Windows character sets, are the open source Mozilla Thunderbird and FoxMail, the most popular Chinese mailer, as I hear.
Once again, a big thank you to the software developers that _have_ taken the time to adapt their software for use in the global village. This includes Microsoft, by the way, whose operating systems do provide the necessary infrastructure.
alx
The latest software that failed my expectations is Zoot, which quite simply refuses to display Greek characters instead of gibberish, even though the Greek script of fonts is selected by default. I imagine it's got something to do with it being a 16-bit application, but others of the same gender work OK.
I admit that the Greek software market is not significant for software vendors outside the EU; but I don't think Greek is the only affected language. What about the Cyrillic alphabet, used in most of Eastern Europe including Russia? What about the growing Chinese market?
It is not surprising that the _only_ two competent Outlook mail client alternatives properly displaying Greek in Unicode, ISO and Windows character sets, are the open source Mozilla Thunderbird and FoxMail, the most popular Chinese mailer, as I hear.
Once again, a big thank you to the software developers that _have_ taken the time to adapt their software for use in the global village. This includes Microsoft, by the way, whose operating systems do provide the necessary infrastructure.
alx
stephenz
3/15/2005 10:21 am
The latest software that failed my expectations is Zoot, which quite simply refuses to display Greek characters instead of gibberish, even though the Greek script of fonts is selected by default. I imagine it's got something to do with it being a 16-bit application, but others of the same gender work OK.
Alexander,
Someone on the Zoot forum was just talking about how he was able to get Zoot to work fine with Japanese characters. I don't know if you'd expect Zoot to work any differently with Japanese than with Greek...
Here is what he wrote:
== begin quoteI saw the accents I use in french change into ideograms... so I went in the customize panel and changed the font to ms gothic, then I saw I could choose an encoding so I chose japanese.... and then I was writing items subjects and body in japanese in zoot. Was I dreaming????? Then I tried to make a query.... AND IT WORKED!!!!!!!!! Of course the quick query pop up displays unreadable stuff but the query is RIGHT!!!! (when we save and look the items in a folder).
This is a revolution for me, I will at last be able to gather everything in zoot, all my mails of different languagues!!!!
A little request would be to allow a different customization for each database, so I could gather my japanese mails in a dedicated database and don't suffer from the changing of french characters!
[in a second note he wrote:]
In fact nothing has been changed in zoot, I just happened to use a japanese computer.
So I tried to tweak mine, and went to the linguistic parameters of XP, switched everything to japanese and oooh miracle, I was able to use japanese in Zoot.
Well, I should have tried this earlier. Sorry to have polluted the forum, but at least I got the solution and it could be useful to other people who won't have to wait for some coincidence to find the trick.
good zoot!
== end quote
I have no idea if his situation has any application to yours or not, but thought I'd send it along in case it does.
Steve Z.
sub
4/4/2005 12:45 pm
[Steve Z.: Someone on the Zoot forum was just talking about how he was able to get Zoot to work fine with Japanese characters. I don't know if you'd expect Zoot to work any differently with Japanese than with Greek...]
Well, it works; though one can choose language scripts on all Unicode fonts such Arial, Times etc, the script seems to be imposed in Zoot only in MS fonts, i.e. MS Gothic, MS Serif etc. This is curious as Arial, Times, Verdana etc are also Microsoft-supplied fonts and they work perfectly well with Greek for most uses. The MS-prefixed fonts are usually selected for system use, so I imagine that's got something to do with it.
Steve and Graham, thanks for the suggestions; an apology to Tom Davis at Zoot for jumping to conclusions; and a sigh of gratitude for the extended --by one- choice of software I now have for working in Greek.
alx
Well, it works; though one can choose language scripts on all Unicode fonts such Arial, Times etc, the script seems to be imposed in Zoot only in MS fonts, i.e. MS Gothic, MS Serif etc. This is curious as Arial, Times, Verdana etc are also Microsoft-supplied fonts and they work perfectly well with Greek for most uses. The MS-prefixed fonts are usually selected for system use, so I imagine that's got something to do with it.
Steve and Graham, thanks for the suggestions; an apology to Tom Davis at Zoot for jumping to conclusions; and a sigh of gratitude for the extended --by one- choice of software I now have for working in Greek.
alx