Greek to you and to me as well

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2967

Posted by sub
2005-03-15 07:28:06

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

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