On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 11:34:43 -0500, Richard Wordingham
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

> Is there a distinction made between allowing users to use other
> languages and being able to mix languages?

Peter Constable knows better, but it seems to me that a
properly-configured computer running reasonably-up-to-date software should
be able to do that. I'm back in the Win 9x time frame, yet I'm often
pleasantly surprised to see what I can do. I did see mixed English and
Thai on my screen, iirc even when I replied and the Thai was quoted.

Fwiw, I have installed all the system software I could get (including IMEs
which I can't routinely get access to), and Arial Unicode. Some task
called "Internat" (probably Microsoft) starts at boot.

Opere 6 used Uniscribe; since then, they have created a cross-platform
"core", and no longer use Uniscribe. It took a while to get Arabic and
Hebrew straightened out; they don't yet handle Indic and some SE Asian
scripts (I'm thinking Bama/Burmese), but Thai seems to render OK (I'm
grossly ignorant of Thai, unfortunately). Afaik, they also fully support
BiDi.

We have, for some years, been free of operating-system restrictions that
made codepage/encoding changes necessary when changing languages. Other
restrictions might still be left over.

HTH,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath