MAC: good or evil?

[Christopher Ott]

It sounds to me like what is really going on has to do with the browser,
not the iMac (I bought one about a month ago) or the Mac OS itself.

I do occasionally have problems getting browsers to recognize the language
encoding for particular pages, although MS Internet Explorer 4 seems to be
a little more adept at this than Netscape and seems to remember better if
you tell it what to do once.  Explorer also seems to have more options
built into it.  I've been looking at Czech pages lately, and while Netscape
just gives one Czech option, Explorer gives three or four different options
for Czech (or at least Eastern European) encodings.  One or another of them
usually works without any problems at all.

For font sizes, I have no problem adjusting the sizes up and down with the
button on the toolbar (again in Explorer).

It's true that some sites are done in fonts that are PC-only (or that are
easier to get for the PC), but in most cases I think there are Mac
equivalents, especially if the site is using some kind of standard encoding.

Mac OS 8.5 also includes an option to install "Multilingual Internet
Access," which gives you read-only (i.e. if you want to write in Japanese
you need to buy the Japanese Language Kit) support for several major
non-Latin-alphabet languages or language groups.  There's no support for
Cyrillic or other EELs, but these seem to work reasonably well in Explorer
anyway.

As for the iMac itself, I'm a long-time Mac user too so take this with a
grain of salt, but I've been very pleased with it so far.  It's fast, and
OS 8.5 is a major improvement in stability over previous versions.  The
Sherlock search feature is also really useful, and I'm using the iMac to
run Windows 98 when necessary through Virtual PC.  That's a little slow,
but it works.

Anyway, I hope this helps.  I'm working on a book about multilingual
computing issues, and would be very interested in knowing what other
people's experience with this has been.

Chris Ott


>>X-Sender: mbaerman at socrates
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>>Date:         Mon, 7 Dec 1998 06:34:00 -0800
>>Reply-To: "SEELangs: Slavic & E. European Languages & literatures list"
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>>Sender: "SEELangs: Slavic & E. European Languages & literatures list"
>>              <SEELANGS at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
>>From: Matthew Baerman <mbaerman at socrates.berkeley.edu>
>>Subject:      MAC: good or evil?
>>To: SEELANGS at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
>>
>>Hello all
>>I have possibly dumbish computer question.  Time has come for a
>>new family computer, and my wife is lobbying for an I-Mac, which
>>is being aggressively marketed in Europe at least  (e.g. there's a 500
>>DM Christmas discount on them).  It claims to be super internet
>>friendly, but I found that it fails to do many of the things one has
>>already taken for granted for ages with the Multilanguage support on
>>PC Windows systems, e.g.:
>>
>>--it does not recognize the text encoding of web pages;  you have to
>>set it each time on a hit-or-miss basis.
>>--even if you do set the encoding, it doesn't always work
>>--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.
>>--some sites use screwy fonts that are geared solely towards PCs,
>>e.g. the MakTimes font used on a lot of Macedonian sites.
>>
>>Unfortunately our local (Tallinn) Mac dealer doesn't have a clue
>>about any of this.  So my question is:  Are the new generation Macs
>>really so bad, or is there some bit of software or some such thing that
>>our dealer forgot to activate?
>>
>>-Matthew Baerman
>>