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.