The Care and Feeding of Foreign Characters
Copyright 1991 by Alex Gross
Accessing, displaying, and printing foreign characters
on a computer can become a vast subject, but I will attempt
to keep it within bounds. There are two main reasons why
this field is so complex. First, each of us would naturally
like to summon up almost any character at will in any size on
any kind of monitor, as though the computer could read our
mind. And we'd also like to print it in any style or color
on any printer, as though here too the printer could know
exactly what we wanted. At least that's what many people
would claim they want. But second and more important, the
hackers who cobbled the first computers together had no way
of sharing this breadth of desire. They were happy that the
machines worked at all, and they never really foresaw how
commonplace computers might become. They improvised their
terminology as they went along, borrowing electronic terms
from punchcard operators and telephone jargon from radio
hams. It was assumed that the only language anyone would
ever want to use on a computer was this weird form of
English, though only in capital letters (and even English was
an afterthought to numbers). This
necessarily meant that accents, cedillas, and cute little
Polish "l's" with tails only got put in as a highly
improvised afterthought in various inconsistent ways.
And this is one reason why there are so many ways of
generating foreign characters today. What follows are
numerous devices–though by no means all of them–to coax
diacritics from your keyboard. Keep in mind, as we said last
month with Cyrillic, that there are trade-offs involved in
most of these solutions. The one you choose will vary
according to your time, knowledge, curiosity and resources.
Each method has advantages and drawbacks.
1) Get a Mac. As noted before, this machine is well
equipped to handle all kinds of graphic characters, including
accents. Drawback: you won't have an IBM compatible PC.
We'll try to discuss this a bit later without getting drawn
into polemics. The following examples assume you are still
IBM- or clone-bound.
2) The WordPerfect Solution. This approach, fairly
close to ideal provided you already use WordPerfect, is also
a good argument for choosing it as your first word processor.
You can either use the Format-Other-Language command, which
will allow you to print (but not view on screen) most
accented characters, or you
can send off for WP's Foreign Language Modules, which come in
twenty-one different languages. These include both Canadian
and continental French, Swiss and orthodox German, Brazilian
and Iberian Portuguese, and-three-count them–versions of
English: American, British, and Australian! Drawback: none,
unless you happen to be wedded to another word processor.
(NOTE: reviews of the French and Spanish modules are still
upcoming). (1)
And now come the other IBM-based strategies:
3) The DOS Formula. The mother of all solutions, but
not for the faint of heart. You will have to open your DOS
manual and read about not one but four relatively obscure
commands: Country, Code Page, Keyboard, and Mode. These will
have an impact on two of your computer's most sacred centers,
its CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files. I will not quote all
the rules here–they are too long, and besides all of our DOS
Manuals are different. But if you (or a more technical
friend) can handle this, then most of your accent problems
should be behind you. Drawbacks: the relative complexity of
the process, but also its near-finality: you can only use one
language at a time, and you will have to be or become adept
at the full foreign keyboard, with its AZERTY for QWERTY in
French and the reversal of "z" and "y"
in German. But once you have mastered this, it is behind you
and really works. You will also be able to keep separate
files for two or more languages, so you can switch between
them.
4) The ASCII Dodge. This is a retail solution, useful
for small quantities of text, provided you are working in
straight ASCII mode or using an ASCII-based word processor.
In this realm each of the common accented letters is produced
by pressing the ALT key plus a specific number. Thus, ALT
plus 136 give you a lower-case "e" with a circumflex. ASCII
tables are widespread in the computer literature, and pop-up
table programs showing the full ASCII "set" on screen can be
found in the screen or print utility file libraries of most
bulletin boards. Drawbacks: this technique's slowness and
clumsiness of use is the lesser complaint. The main problems
involve not only making sure your printer can handle these
characters (alas, no substitute here for hands-on work over
your printer manual) but also transferring these characters
correctly in and out of ASCII and various word processor
formats, which are not identical. For instance, older
versions of MicroSoft Word assign a different character to
ALT plus 136. Michelle Battaglia provided a relatively
simple two-step search-and-replace solution at a recent NY
Circle meeting: search for all your circumflexed "e's" and
replace them with a unique code in Word Processor A, such as
"e6," then convert to ASCII. Pour the ASCII file into word
processor B and then search out all instances of "e6:" globally
replace them with the correct form for circumflexed "e."
5) COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS: Here we come back to Fancy
Font (or Fancy Word), which I mentioned last month. It will
provide disks for French, Spanish, Greek, Russian, and a
generic "Germanic," as well as some weirder alphabets. (2)
But you still won't see accents on the screen. Typical font
sizes for the French and Spanish are 12, 14, 16, and 18
points in regular, italic, and bold, though no doubt the age
of lasers and postscript has now created a far wider range of
choice. Beware: when I received their very first Spanish
disks, the upside down question marks were floating in mid
line, and they simply doubled the "more-than" and "less-than"
signs to create quotation marks. Perhaps this has been
solved by now–ask before you order. Windows Write and Word
for Windows, with their Mac-like environment, are also likely
to handle these characters well, but they require powerful
systems to run at their best. .
6) SHAREWARE: weighing in here most impressively is a
new multilingual word processor called INTEXT. You can
download it free on many bulletin boards (most recent
version: INTEXT12.ZIP) or send away for a more complete
version from its creator. (3) It boasts several accompanying
files for many languages, though you can only use one at a time.
The file called "&EUROPE" contains keyboards for most of that
continent's tongues based on the latin alphabet and even
allows you to choose between QWERTY and AZERTY in French.
Other files are entitled Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Greek, Russian,
Polish, and "Yugoslavian." You will not see the letters on
the screen, however, and I have to confess that unlike others
I haven't got it to print very much yet, either because of
the age of my printer or my aversion to changing my dip
switches again. The program comes up readily on my monitor
(which an earlier version didn't) and claims to work only
with 24-pin dot matrix printers, though this may have changed
by now. One other shareware program, a golden oldie called
CHIWRITER, is also worth mentioning. You will still find
older versions gratis on BBS's, but its creators have now
opted for respectability and put out a still modestly priced
commercial version. (4) It will give you Greek along with
lots of math and symbols, some accented characters, and a few
other typographical gismos. Its typefaces are pretty
rudimentary, but newer versions boast laserjet quality.
HARDWARE SOLUTIONS: These include not only messing with
dip switches (I always use the shirt-pocket hook end of a
ballpoint pen-top for these, though a toothpick works too)
but actual boards you can insert inside your machine. Both
Hercules and Rampage boast such boards with character
capability, but make sure your computer and all its
attachments are unplugged before you try opening the box! I
have no first hand experience of either board–can some of
our readers provide more details? Specific query: does
anyone know if the Duke University Language Toolkit still
exists–haven't heard about it for a while.
As I said about Cyrillic, some translators imagine there
is simply no way to use foreign characters, but the real
wonder is the sheer number of options. If you are using yet
another method our readers could profit from, by all means
let us know, and we'll include it in further coverage of this
subject later this year. It would be helpful if you could
tell us what systems, printers, monitors, graphics cards, or
parent programs it works (or doesn't work) with.
And now, since I've recommended the Mac so highly, a
few words on the great Mac-PC debate. My own view is roughly
this: the Mac is already a fine machine and likely to get
even better. The newer versions are much cheaper, though not
if you want color. But if I were starting over again today,
I would still choose an IBM Clone for most (though not all)
purposes for three reasons:
1) Compatibility--seven out of eight personal computers
are still IBM's or clones.
2) Ultimate expense--software for the Mac is almost
always more expensive than PC Software, not even including:
3) Shareware--the vast range of software available for
the PC free or for nominal sums. It keeps being created and
improved at a staggering rate. There is probably as much new
shareware and public domain software available for the PC
every few months as the entire supply of Mac shareware. This
remarkable storehouse of the useful and playful in my opinion
ranks right up there with papyrus scrolls, illuminated
manuscripts, the first encyclopedias, radio, film and
television as one of humanity's major cultural achievements.
And it keeps on growing in front of us.
One final thought--I hope I'm not sounding too flip or
smug about computers. If I advise you in passing to install
a language module or delve into DOS or open your machine and
plug in a board, I'm not for an instant suggesting that any
of these is necessarily easy to do, especially if you are
trying it for the first time. Some computer tasks are
intrinsically difficult, even for
highly skilled people, and no one should feel guilty if
things are sometimes hard going. But just as frequently such
procedures can actually be easy and usually need to be done
only once. If a particular task takes forever and bogs you
down in endless calls to Tech Support numbers, then it may
not be what you need, and perhaps another solution will work
better.
(1) Contact the WordPerfect Corporation, 1555 North
Technology Way, Orem, UT 84057, for more details. TEL:(800)
451-5151.
(2) FancyFont & FancyWord are available from SoftCraft,
Inc, 222 State Street, Madison, WI 53703, TEL: (608) 257-
3300.
(3) The latest INTEXT program with all language files
is available for $49 from Intex Software Systems
International, P.O. Box 3068, Stamford, CT 06905-0068. They
also have listings of programs for other languages, and some
of these will be reviewed in future articles.
(4) The last price I saw for the commercial version of
CHIWRITER was $79, but check with CHIWRITER, Horstmann
Software Design, P.O. Box 4544, Ann Arbor, MI 48106.
NOTE: This piece originally appeared in the May 1991
issue of the ATA Chronicle, published by the American Translators Association.