Language support for OS X...

[thinkofthestars]

Hey, need some help with language support on my iBook. I'm collecting translations of articles for the guy I work for and I'm having a problem reading Greek. Well, I don't actually KNOW Greek, but I need to at least see the text in order to upload it to the web. I did some searches on Google and found that Apple added Greek support in 10.2. I have 10.3, so it should be on here somewhere. I went into my system preferences, clicked on International, then went to edit (the list) and added Greek. I opened up the document in MS Word and it's still not showing me any Greek text! Just a bunch of lines and a few English words here and there. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Keri

 

[Makosuke]

Well, the only specific experience I have is with working with Japanese, but if you're having trouble with Word, I don't think it relates directly to Apple's language support in the OS. Reason being, Word (I think) uses its own language encoding scheme, rather than just letting the OS handle stuff.

So if your version of word doesn't support Greek text and the original document was a Greek Word doc, then you're probably out of luck (though you could try opening it in TextEdit--it does import Word format, after all, and might be able to translate the encoding).

If, on the other hand, the document wasn't a Word doc, and uses a standard Greek encoding (Unicode would be the best, but there's probably another one as well), then the OS theoretically should be able to do something with it. TextEdit would again be the first app to try, but you could also try viewing it with a web browser and messing around with the character encoding settings; if it uses a standard encoding scheme, the browser should be able to display it.

Final thing to try: In some cases, I've had luck opening a document in a program like BBEdit Light (TextEdit might work, too), and just switching the font to an appropriate one. It's possible the OS just isn't displaying the text in the correct font. (By the way, make sure you actually have Greek fonts installed; I don't remember if they're installed by default.

 

[mkrishnan]

Well, the only specific experience I have is with working with Japanese, but if you're having trouble with Word, I don't think it relates directly to Apple's language support in the OS. Reason being, Word (I think) uses its own language encoding scheme, rather than just letting the OS handle stuff.

Ditto this. MS Office.X does NOT support Unicode, which is how Apple implements non-Roman character sets. I believe the only non-Roman characters Office.X fully supports are the Japanese character sets. And it doesn't even seem to me that it supports them particularly well. Which I am not happy about. Hopefully the next Office, due out this summer, will be better. Esp. since Office on the PC seems to have fairly good language support.

Appleworks supports Unicode and can import MS Word. It might be worth a try. If you've installed Greek support correctly, you should at least be able to *write* in Greek in Appleworks.

 

[thinkofthestars]

Ahhh, thanks so much. I was able to read the Greek by opening up the document in TextEdit. I didn't ever install any language packs or anything. I just added it in system preferences. In any event, it works fine in TextEdit. I think I'll give AppleWorks a try if it supports it. Good thing I haven't payed for Office v.X yet. I'm still running on my trial with 16 days left. If a new version is due out in the summer, I might just wait.

If Japanese works the same, that will be good too. I work on a site about Aikido and other Japanese martial arts, even though I know nothing about any of it. It's currently in English right now, with a Japanese sister site, but we're looking to translate our articles into Japanse and any other languages that people are willing to translate for us.

I don't have any need to write in Greek, since I don't even know the language. I just need to view it. Thanks for the help!

~Keri