Middle East and East Asian Cultures
The first 6 chapters of this book deal with internationalisation using traditional Latin languages that use a left-to-right notation. Whilst left-to-right languages make up a large part of the world’s written text, an equally large part is covered a wide variety of non-left-to-right languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Persian (Farsi) to name but three.
The author opens this chapter with an explanation of how to install Supplemental Language Support, such that we can render right-to-left languages. Mention of Windows Vista, which already has support for supplemental languages built right into the operating system, merely serves to confirm that the author has endeavoured to get this first edition as up to date is as possible.
This chapter makes more use of screenshots than other chapters. This is a good thing as a couple of new concepts are introduced, most notably unmirrored and mirrored Windows Forms. Whilst I have seen Arabic Windows XP before, it was useful to see it presented in this chapter – it is, after all, probably the first right-to-left language that most of us are familiar with. Common questions, such as “which version of Windows support mirroring?” are succinctly answered.
There would appear to be a few subtle mirroring differences between .NET 1.1 and 2.0. A few screenshots present these differences better than words could describe.
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