Cyrillic & Win95

[David Powelstock]

I've been heavily researching multilingual support for Windows 95.  There
are a million keyboard utilities for this out there for Win 3.x, but
everyone's a little behind on the Win 95 front, perhaps because they were
waiting to see what would be included with the operating system.  (By the
way, don't waste your time calling Microsoft about this.  I did it; they
were useless.)  SmartLink, in LA (http://www.deltanet.com/smartlink;  they
have impressive-looking stuff), promises me they'll be coming out with Win
95 compatible versions of their products fairly soon.  Look for them, and
others on the multilingual computing front at the AAASS COnference.  Ask
them hard questions.  I myself have become so desparate that I figured out
how to edit the code of one of Win 95's keyboard layout files in order to
produce an AATSEEL Student mapping.  If all goes well with this process,
I'll let you all know when I'm done and make the edited file available somehow.

Incidentally, I'll also try my Win 3.1 keyboard utility, Exceller's Cyrillic
Support, under WIndows 95, to see if it works.  I have always been extremely
pleased with it under Win 3.1.  Also, has anyone noticed another problem
with WIn 95: If you're typing in Russian, with English as the default
language, whenever you hit return, the language switches back to English.
Does this not happen when using a third party keyboard utility.  This
strikes me as a pretty serious inconvenience.

Best,
David


At 09:25 AM 9/29/95 -0700, you wrote:
>I've recently explored Win95's multilingual support.  On the
>whole the support is pretty good and seems to integrate fairly
>seamlessly with the whole environment, with the exception that
>one has to choose a font specific to the character set in
>question.  Microsoft made a serious mistake, though, when it
>included only Russian standard keyboard layouts for Russian.  The
>vast majority of American users of Win95 Russian support will
>type best with layouts that are maximally homophonic with
>American standard keyboards, such as the AATSEEL student keyboard
>and variations thereof.  So what we need in the meantime is a
>keyboard reassignment utility that works and installs decently
>into Win95.  My current utility functions in Win95, but the
>installation was buggy.  Any suggestions out there for keyboard
>utilities that are capable of remapping the entire keyboard under
>Win95, that install cleanly, and that allow switching between two
>or more keyboard layouts?
>
>
David Powelstock
Slavic Languages & Literatures
University of Chicago
1130 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL  60637
(O)   312-702-0035
(Dpt) 312-702-8033 (msg)
(H)   312-324-5842 (msg)