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 established support for multiple languages on Macintosh computers before OS X. It is also built into the Carbon framework in OS X. In WorldScript, each language has a "script" that supports the standard character set and encoding for that language. Scripts also contain instructions for handling lines of text, sorting characters, formatting dates and times, and so on. WorldScript provides two distinct Chinese scripts: Traditional Chinese (based on the Big Five character set) and Simplified Chinese (based on the GB 2312 character set).
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.
- Some applications support Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane, but they don't support its other, supplementary, planes.
- Most "WorldScript-savvy" applications can now handle Unicode-encoded documents, but they are not completely Unicode-savvy. This is because they are limited to handling characters that are supported by WorldScript. While they are able to convert text to and from Unicode, these applications use WorldScript-aware text engines to store text internally in the standard encodings supported by WorldScript and the Mac OS.
- Some WorldScript-savvy applications do not support Unicode at all.
About Us
This web site was founded in 1998 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.