Re: TECH: Unicode and Macs

Steg Belsky wrote:
> yet another question from me :P
>
> my computer isn't very good, and i'm thinking of getting a laptop to
> replace it with.  having suffered for 8 years with junky
> constantly-freezing DOS/Windows-running computers, i'm thinking of now
> getting a Mac.  Do any of you have a mac (with the latest version of the
> operating system)?  What's your experience of its handling of unicode and
> other conlang-necessary things?
>
> I tried out a mac running OS X10.2 today at my father's workplace, and it
> seemed okay.  One problem though was that the Hebrew keyboard layout
> didn't match up to what i'm used to - all the major letters were in the
> proper Standard Israeli layout, but the diacritics were all in different
> places.  Also, i'm used to the "US-International" keyboard layout on my
> computer now, and the 'Special Characters' or whatever they called it
> layout seemed a bit confusing.  I'm sure i'd eventually get used to it,
> though.  I also couldn't find any guide to the keyboard layouts, like a
> pop-up onscreen keyboard image or anything like that.
>
> But anyway, anyone here with a recent-OS mac?  Do you get unicode emails
> through the Conlang/culture lists properly?
Yes. Netscape 7.x handles it fine, both for email and web pages (OS 9.2).

I remember hearing that
> there have been problems with some non-[Modern]English characters,
> especially thorn and edh, with Macs.  Are those still a problem?  Every
> so often people send random unicode characters through here, such as
> Chinese place-names, text in Russian, Hebrew or Arabic, or the Devanagari
> |th| on Conlang from a few days ago.  Have you been able to read them all
> properly?

Again, yes. Macs are definitely [becoming] competetive.

--
=============
James Worlton
          "Time flies like an arrow.
           Fruit flies like a banana."
                           --Unknown