CompuServe Messages

Whether the Amiga is more or less suited for Chinses use is not dependant on the question of "can you make a font?". It's the question of "How many characters can a font contain?" that decides the issue, as well as "is the capability generally usable in applications?" The Amiga's operating system doesn't support fonts with more than about 256 characters. Fonts for other languages often have far more than 256 symbols; Korean, Japanese and Chinese are good examples of very rich character sets not suited for use in a one-byte encoding environment. Windows (even at v 3.1, which is getting a little long in the tooth) supports – and integrates in various applications – double-byte font encoding, resulting in tens of thousands more characters thant the 256 available in an Amiga font set. Under Windows 3.1, I can, and do, use huge font sets in standard applications; Korean and Chinese in specific. Farsi, Japanese, Cyrllic, Hebrew, Vietnamese, and Thai font capabilities are all currently available for transparent use within Windows applicaitons to my certain knowledge. Under AmigaDOS, I can't do anything even remotely resembling transparent use. That simple fact is why I stated that the Amiga isn't a reasonable candidate for a Chinese base system. –Ben …via AutoPilot