This document describes how to use TextMaker to write in the world
s languages.
This document is work in progress, so if you have additional information or corrections, please send your input to
info@softmaker.de
Note:
TextMaker can be used for creating documents in almost
language. However, the following languages are currently
supported:
Chinese, Japanese, Korean
(TextMaker does not support two-byte characters)
Hebrew, Arabic
(TextMaker does not support right-to-left writing systems)
Introduction
While writing text in English and most Western European languages is possible on any computer, using languages with accented characters (e.g. Central European languages) might require some preparations. This document will lead you through the necessary steps. It is divided into the following sections:
1. Where to find suitable
fonts
2. Where to get a suitable
keyboard mapping
3. How to type text in your native language
1. Where to find suitable fonts
Fonts can contain just one
font encoding
(i.e. character set) or several encodings at once (for example Western European, Central European, and Turkish). So, if you want to type text in Turkish, you have to use a font that contains a Turkish font encoding.
Of course, not all fonts come with all kinds of encodings. But, depending on your operating system, there might be some fonts that you can most certainly use:
Windows and Windows CE fonts
Users of
Windows
as well as
Pocket PCs and Handheld PCs
can use the so called
core fonts
coming with your operating system (e.g. Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, Tahoma). These usually
contain all accented characters for writing in Western and Central European languages, Baltic languages, Turkish, Greek, Cyrillic, and several more.
To make things a bit confusing, there are
different versions
of these core fonts floating around. Firstly, Microsoft has added new characters to these fonts from Windows version to Windows version. Secondly, some Microsoft applications install
extended
versions of Arial and Tahoma, for example, with more character sets built-in.
Therefore, if you exchange documents with a user that has a more limited version of the core fonts installed, some special characters might not be displayed correctly on his/her machine. Additionally, the core fonts on most Pocket PCs and Handheld PCs have a smaller character set in general.
Bottom line:
You should first
document exchange before relying on non-standard characters to transfer between computers.
You can easily examine which characters a certain font contains.
Windows
ships with a program called
Character Map
(charmap.exe) that displays the character sets of any installed font. A similar feature is available on the most modern
Pocket PCs and Handheld PCs
as well, only it is well-hidden: Start Pocket Excel or Pocket Word and go to the Tools menu to display and insert characters.
Linux fonts
Since there a so many different distributions a Linux available, you can
t tell which fonts in distribution
comes with multiple encodings. You should either simply try it out or use tools like
xfontsel
to find out which fonts provide the encodings you need.
The SoftMaker font named
Roman-PS
(included in TextMaker) does include many encodings
it even has Cyrillic characters.
Other fonts
Other fonts
that you acquired somewhere or that got installed by some application often just contain the characters necessary to display Western European languages. If you type an accented character with one of these fonts, but your computer just displays a blank character or square, then this font is missing the character. Replace it by a font that has the font encoding you need for your language. Suitable fonts are available at almost any font vendor. (Also check out SoftMaker
MegaFont XXL
font library at
www.softmaker.com
. It contains many
XXL fonts
with numerous encodings).
2. Where to get a suitable keyboard mapping
While you could you use a tool like a character map to insert accented characters into your documents, getting a suitable
keyboard mapping
makes things a lot easier. Some operating systems have support for non-English keyboard mappings already built in, some require third party software:
Keyboard mappings in Windows
All versions of desktop
Windows
since Windows 95 have support for many languages already
built-in
. This support is either already active (e.g. an Italian copy of Windows automatically installs an Italian keyboard mapping and fonts with Italian characters) or can be installed as an optional component.
To add additional languages to Windows:
Go to your PC
Control Pane
(Start > Settings > Control Panel).
Select
Regional Settings
(depending on your version of Windows, this might also be titled
Regional and language settings
, or
Country settings
, or something similar).
When you double-click on this symbol, a dialog consisting of multiple pages will appear. On one of the pages, you will find an option for adding additional regional keyboards. Add the additional keyboards that you would like to use.
From now on, you will be able to type text in the language(s) you installed.
Keyboard mappings on Pocket PCs and Handheld PCs
Pocket PCs and Handheld PCs
support, out of the box, just
keyboard mapping: the one of the country where the device was sold (or English, if Microsoft did not localize for your country). There is no official Microsoft way to add additional keyboard mappings to your operating system.
If no keyboard mapping is available for your language, you have to buy a third-party product that provides it. Here is a list of some products that we have found:
(Note: The version we tested refused to work with non-English devices; it wouldn't install e.g. on a German device. To be sure that your machine is supported, you should try the trial version first).
Pocket PC Thai
(supporting Thai only):
www.pocketpcthai.net/product.php
Some other tools can be found on www.eitcenter.com/pocketpc/dl_thai.htm
Please note that we neither warrant for the performance of these products nor explicitly recommend them. They are just listed to save you the time finding them yourself. You should check out if they suit your needs on your own before you consider purchasing them.
Keyboard mappings in Linux
Most Linux distributions support a very large variety of non-English keyboards. You can either choose the keyboard layout when you install Linux, or change it later (using the control center of the Window Manager you have installed). Refer to the documentation included with your Linux distribution for further details.
3. How to type text in your native language
To finally type text in your native language with TextMaker, you have to do two things:
Activate a keyboard mapping
suitable for your language (as described in section 2).
Select a font
that has the required characters for your language (as described in section 1):
the font list in TextMaker contains suitable fonts with all these suffixes. Arial, for example, is listed as five different fonts: Arial, Arial CE, Arial Baltic, Arial CYR, Arial Greek, and Arial TUR.
All you have to do is select the font with the right suffix for your language.
Pocket PCs, Handheld PCs,
Linux
, the font list contains just the base font with Western characters. Select this base font (Arial or Tahoma, for example), click in the edit control of the font name and
manually change it from
Arial
Arial CE
(leave a blank character between the font name and the suffix!).
As it is a bit tedious to always manually add the correct suffix, you may want to open your preferred document template (Normal.tmv in most cases), add one or more character styles with the font names manually fixed and save the document template. If you base your future documents on this document template, you can select your national font by choosing it from the
dropdown or
Format > Character Style.
Tip: Changing TextMaker
default font encoding
setting
TextMaker has an option that lets you choose the default font encoding for fonts containing multiple encodings. To change it, call up
Extras/Preferences
, switch to the
General
tab, and select the desired
default font encoding
By default,
default font encoding
is set to
Western
(ISO 8859-1/15). When you select a font with multiple encodings now, the Western encoding is used. The only way to access the Central European encoding is to manually add
to the font name (as described above).
If you set the
default font encoding
Central Europe
(ISO 8859-2) and select a font with multiple encodings, the
Central European
encoding is used (if it exists). You
have to add
manually there.
Note: When you have set the
default font encoding
to an encoding different from
Western
, you can still access the Western encoding by manually adding
(.txt)