Grateful for any advice please. I freely admit I know SFA about computers.

My home PC is supported by Windows XP and I have successfully(?) enabled the Thai - kedmanee script and keyboard. I switch between English UK and Thai by pressing left ALT/shift. However, when sending e-mail (AOL) I am unable to change language. Why is this and is there a way around it?

Cheers,

Scouse.

Hi Scouser,

First, congrat you have realy successfully enabled the thai language, the fact you can change the language in others application mean you did it. Then nothing related to that.

I don't use AOL, but I can give you some advices who can be usefull (hope but I am not sure).

I had the same trouble with another programm (who give the possibility to put text on a video with a timing ... I used it to made Karaoke) this is how I found a solution.

the "normal" alphbet is coded in ASCII (American Standart ... I forget the rest sorry) it mean you use only the basic european letter, there is no accentuation, no special characters. For other language, it's coded in ISO 8 if I remenber well. This is the theory, next step is how to find a solution.

Click start, then all programms, accessorie, and choose NotePad.

in Norpad, switch in thai, and type your text with thai alphabet ... when finish, cut and past in Aol. You must precise to your correspondent they must switch the encoding in "Autoselect" or better "thai (windows). To do that, they must right click, and select in the pop up : encoding. Sometimes the thai text is a mess (very special characters) that make all correct.

I hope that can help you, this advice is also usefull for those who work in journalism field (as Bangkok post) because there is a bug in Quark Express release 4, then here is a solution.

Best regards

I will tell you why Windows XP/NT/2000 and 98 (sort of) can support many languages. In the old days there was ASCII, this code could only represent 255 different characters. To represent other languages, you would have a thing called a codepage which would say "this is Thai", and the 255 character positions could then represent the Thai character set. This was rather cumbersome, and meant you could only represent one language at any time. Then came Unicode. This can represent every character in every language (and many langages that have not been defined yet). Thus, there is no need to have something to indicate the language, and you can use many different scripts at the same time. This is what the newer windows use.

Now the hard bit. Fonts for displaying characters. Many fonts don't have the characters for all the characters in Unicode. These are called glyphs (the actual drawn character). So the font can take the value for a character, but it may not have the glyph to draw the character. This is often a problem with Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, and some of obscure Indian languages.

Some programs are not Unicode aware. Maybe they were developed for the older versions of windows that supported the 255 ASCII system, but the developers have not been able to make their application fully Unicode compatible. Windows XP has a ASCII 255 character compatibility mode where you can define another language, other than US English, that can be used; but only one other language can be defined.

For simplicity, I would try and use the email program in Windows (Outlook or Outlook Express). Can you get that to work with AOL? I'm sure it can be done?

Thanks for the advice chaps. Unfortunately AOL does not allow the operation of Microsoft Outlook. I'll have to stick to the cut and paste.

Cheers,

Scouse.

AOL sucks. Go for a better ISP.

Where are you scouser? I'm on dee Wirral la, but we're in Cheshire now!

Dere's posh, like. I'm North of the water, in Crosby, but not for long. Booked my ticket yesterday and arrive in LoS on 2 November.

You're right AOL is p**s poor, but there's no point in changing ISP now.

Regards,

Scouse.