Single Worldwide Binary:
All versions of Windows 2000 use the same executable code to run Win32 based applications. Infact, the only difference between these binaries from one language to another is in the translation of their resources.
This allows users to:
- Enter text in any language using any version of Windows 2000. For example, a user can write Hebrew on a Japanese version of Windows 2000.
- Run any language version of Win32 applications on any language version of Windows 2000. For example, one can run an Arabic Win32 application on a Russian Windows 2000.
The single worldwide binary also benefits developers, who can:
- Build all language versions of their product on one system. Shipping one functional core-binary to all platforms and for all different language versions reduces the hassle and costs of development significantly:
- It eliminates conditional compiling.
- It eliminates the need to maintain separate source code branches.
- Ship all languages at the same time, preventing delays in deploying the product worldwide.
Finally, IT managers benefit because they
- Deal with fewer system differences from one language to another. This eases the maintenance and administration effort.
Fully Unicode:
Multilingual computing is made possible by Windows 2000’s native Unicode encoding (UTF-16 little-endian) and its complete support for Unicode. There is no more ANSI/OEM codepage dependency under Windows 2000! Infact, support for new scripts (such as the Indic family, Armenian, and Georgian) is added through pure Unicode encoding and no ANSI or OEM code pages are defined for these scripts. Hence, hundreds of languages are supported out of the box.
Figure : Windows 2000 Notepad with multiple scripts displayed simultaneously.
Complex scripts support:
Several scripts, due to their linguistic requirements, need special handling when it comes to the layout and display of text electronically.
A few of these challenges are:
Uniscribe, the layout and shaping engine for these scripts, is built into Windows 2000 and provides consistent support across its clients (Windows 2000, Microsoft Office 2000 and Office XP, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 and beyond).
To learn more about Windows 2000 complex script support you can refer to: Multilanguage text support in Windows 2000.
Multilingual User Interface:
The Windows 2000 Multilanguage Version (MUI) allows users – for the first time – to select the language of the User Interface (dialog boxes, menus, HTML help files etc).
To support MUI, changes were made in the system’s resource loader to load the right resource files for a given process based on the currently selected UI language. Users can install MUI resources files for all 24 languages in which Windows 2000 is localized. Resource files for each language require about 40 to 50 megabytes of disk space and give a little more than 90% localization of the user interface (versus 100% for a typical localized OS). MUI’s primary goal is to decrease the cost of implementing and maintaining IT environments with multiple languages. To learn more about MUI, you can refer to Microsoft’s FAQ related to this subject. You can also take advantage of MUI technology to offer your own multilingual UI solution
Mirroring technology:
This technology was designed to allow a perfect right-to-left (RTL) look and feel of the User Interface (UI) for RTL languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. Because of the changes made in the system’s User and GDI components, the creation of mirrored applications almost becomes a transparent job to developers. Only a few simple considerations are needed when creating Windows and mapping coordinates.
To learn more about the mirroring technology you can refer to Microsoft’s globalization guidelines on mirroring
Figure : A mirrored Explorer window (Hebrew Windows 2000).
Fonts:
To accommodate multilingual computing and to properly display text in a multilingual context, Microsoft Windows 2000 introduces three new technologies:
- OpenType fonts: This new font format, developed jointly by Microsoft and Adobe, is infact an extension to the TrueType font specification. The OpenType fonts in Windows 2000 include expanded repertoires of glyphs to accommodate Pan-European, Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai scripts. To learn more about OpenType and fonts in general, refer to Microsoft’s typography site.
- Font fallback: This mechanism, made available through Uniscribe (see section on Complex Scripts Support), provides a fallback font (or a default font) when dealing with complex scripts. If the selected font face does not include any glyphs for the complex script that is about to be displayed, Uniscribe selects a default hardcoded font for the given script. For example, if you have Hindi text and the font is Courier, then Uniscribe will use the Mangal font. This technique is internal to Uniscribe and developers can not add additional fonts to the list of fallback fonts.
- Font linking: This technique is mainly used to accommodate East Asian languages and uses a registry setting of fonts linked in a list to a facename. If the required glyph is not in the nominal facename, GDI searches each font in the list of those linked to the face name until it finds one with the required glyph. This new font is then linked to the nominal font (base font). Users and developers should not modify the list of linked fonts in the registry, since it might cause serious display problems.
Expanded NLS:
The Windows 2000 National Language Support (NLS) APIs provide support for displaying regional and culturally-correct formatted data (calendar, currency symbol, date & time, sort tables etc.) for 126 locales.