Introduction
Every copy of Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5 comes with built-in multilingual support that includes Chinese. Although 10.1 and 10.2 also support Chinese, we recommend that you upgrade to 10.3, 10.4, or 10.5 if you intend to use Chinese on a regular basis in OS X. In addition, all OS 9 CDs worldwide include Chinese support.
"WorldScript" is Apple's trademark for the technology that supported multiple languages on Macintosh computers before OS X. It remains as part of the Carbon framework in OS X. In WorldScript, each language has a "script" that supports character and encoding standards for that language. Scripts also contain instructions for handling text, sorting characters, and so on. WorldScript provides two distinct Chinese scripts: Traditional Chinese, based on the Big Five standard, and Simplified Chinese, based on the GB 2312 standard.
Support for the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode is complete in OS 9.1 and above. Support for the Supplementary Ideographic Plane is complete in OS X 10.1 and above. There are four levels of Unicode support in applications that support Chinese on the Macintosh.
- The principal criterion for a "Unicode-savvy" application is the ability to correctly input, display, and print Unicode characters in all planes. These applications use Unicode-aware text engines to store text internally in Unicode format.
- A few applications (for example, Microsoft Office 2004 and 2008) support Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), but they don't support its other, supplementary, planes.
- Most "WorldScript-savvy" applications can convert text to and from Unicode, but they are not completely Unicode-savvy because they are limited to handling characters supported by WorldScript. These applications use WorldScript-aware text engines to store text internally in the standard encodings supported by WorldScript and the Mac OS.
- A few WorldScript-savvy applications do not support Unicode at all.
Note: While the majority of applications available today are fully Unicode-savvy, there are still some that only support the BMP. Thankfully, unless you are running applications in the Classic environment or an older version of OS X, it is no longer very likely that you'll need to know much of anything about WorldScript. There was a time when it was crucial to know something about character sets, encodings, document formats, and the like, especially for Mac OS users working in Chinese at the height of Windows' dominance. That frustration and confusion was the main impetus for the establishment of this web site back then, not so long ago. Our page listing applications, for example, once carefully tracked and explained the changes in Chinese-language support in every version of a given software. Today there is little need for anything like that. We still maintain the page, but it's with a great sigh of relief that it's now become more of a list of editor's choices than anything else.
One major exception to this rule is fonts. For most users, it is enough to know whether a font supports Traditional Chinese (Big Five), Simplified Chinese (GB 2312), or both (Unicode, GBK, GB 18030). More advanced users, however, will need an understanding of character sets (like those listed in parentheses here) in order to work with certain fonts.
About Us
This web site was founded in 1998 (in a different location) by Eric Rasmussen, with help and advice from Kerim Friedman.
Many people have helped out as the site has developed over the years, including Aki Abe, Iwo Amelung, Steven Angle, Charles Belov, Michael Brasser, Kai-shao Chen, Nien-po Chen, Cynthia Col, Jason Cox, Christopher Cullen, Douglas Davidson, John Delacour, Dale Dellinger, Rard Denissen, Tom Gewecke, Rickford Grant, Fritz Grohmann, Bob Hall, Zev Handel, Jeffrey Hayden, Matthew Hills, Timothy Huang, Nobumi Iyanaga, Nina Jalladeau, Fuxue Jin, Charles Lee, Eugene Lee, Henry Leperlier, Magnus Lewan, Joe Lewis, Lukhnos D. Liu, Nello Lucchesi, Xinjiang Lü, Andrew Main, Patrick Moran, Tee Peng, Jens Østergaard Petersen, Greg Pringle, Sven Rossbach, Jacques Rougeaux, Leo Shin, Jonathan Skaff, Robert Smitheram, Leo So, Edward Spodick, Glenn Tiffert, Kelvin Tsang, Ken Tsang, Hsu-min Tseng, Shiangtai Tuan, Etienne de la Vaissière, Sue Wiles, Joe Wicentowski, Amnon Yaish, Weizhong Yang, Dominic Yu, Weiyun Yu, Eddie Yuen, Peide Zha, and Allen Zhao.