Re: Pictures of text or international characters? Re: [w3c-wai-ig] <none>

> Modern computers solve this - an off-the-shelf Macintosh will render 
> many languages without worrying.

You have to make a deliberate decision to install Chinese fonts on
Windows 2000.  I think the same may be true of Windows XP.  On Linux
installs you also have to make choices, and some fonts are poorly
supported (e.g. only the isolated forms of Arabic characters - Indic
characters are also difficult - they need more than just selecting 
a glyph for the character).

People using Windows 2000 (XP) in an office may not have access to
install media, and, as the fonts are on the install media, they cannot
fall back to Windows Update (even assuming they are allowed to use it).
They may have diskless systems that reset to a clean configuration on
every reboot.

However, many of the target audience may well be using IE 4 on Windows
95; there are a lot of people still using Windows 95, even in the UK.
Windows 95 is not supported, so you cannot do a Windows update to add
fonts.  The last time I tried, download.microsoft.com did have them,
if you knew where to look.  Even NT 4 hasn't offered language packs on
Windows Update for about six months now.  (If anyone has a Windows
system prior to 2000, and think they may ever need language support
in the future, they ought to download it now.)

Received on Monday, 29 September 2003 17:08:09 UTC