MAC: good or evil?

[Kevin Moss]

I'll begin by saying that I'm a devoted Mac user, from the days when Macs
were the only system that could deal with fonts easily...

While there are obvious problems with compatibility in terms of disks and
filesharing, I haven't had any problems with the net AT ALL. (Except the
fact that Adobe PageMill for Mac makes it impossible for me to _write_ html
for Russian text, but that's not most people's goal).

I'll try to address these in order, with my Power Mac & Netscape 3.0 (not
4, which I hear has problems with fonts)



>--it does not recognize the text encoding of web pages;  you have to
>set it each time on a hit-or-miss basis.

Mine does, _usually_, recognize the text encoding itself. It didn't use to,
but it started to surprise me a few months ago.

>--even if you do set the encoding, it doesn't always work

I've never yet found a font on the net my browser couldn't read
(admittedly, I'm usually talking Russian, not Macedonian or Bulgarian. I
have successfully configured my browser to read Czech and Hungarian as
well.)

>--you can't make the fonts bigger by just clicking an icon, you have
>reset the default font-by-font, and then even that doesn't work most
>of the time.  Thus much ends up illegibly small.

I don't know about this, but I've never had problems with the fonts being
illegibly small. Perhaps because my monitor is set to 640 X 480, which
makes everything bigger.

>--some sites use screwy fonts that are geared solely towards PCs,
>e.g. the MakTimes font used on a lot of Macedonian sites.

Again, I haven't found these, but I wouldn't put it past them. Hope this helps!

Kevin Moss
Russian Dept.
Middlebury College
Middlebury, VT 05753

tel: (802) 443-5786
fax: (802) 443-5394
www.middlebury.edu/~moss

 Certe, Toto, sentio nos in Kansate non iam adesse!