Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 02:11:12 -0000
From: EvangeList <evangelist@apple.com>
Subject: Tidbit - Thai on Mac vs. PC

Keyword: Advocacy, Why Macs Are Better

This tidbit is from:

David Russell

Finally, after "reaping" so much wealth from the list, I have a (small) 
contribution.

We're a small language research firm and one of our staffers was crawling 
the WWW in search of info on Thai-language computer manuals (imagine 
opening the box to your new G3 and discovering everything was printed in 
Thai). He printed out a stack of stuff and asked me to look through it.

Included in this printout was info from a site (thaifamily.org) 
explaining how to view Thai on Netscape. Of course the two following 
links were for Macintosh and Windows95. Well, the staffer had printed out 
these instructions as well. The first page was how to do it on a Mac. 
This page said that, "you can easily...by obtaining a program called 
'ThaiUpdate for Netscape'...downloading the program...double-click..." 
etc. The steps were not numbered and the whole printout was less than one 
US Letter-sized page.

OK, the Win95 instructions:

Before, "Step 1: Obtaining Thai Fonts," is the following: "Assume (sic) 
that Netscape Navigator is working properly on your system, then there 
are 3 steps..."; Obtaining Thai Fonts, Installing, and Telling NN to use 
the fonts...which have a total of 18 sub-steps taking up a total of 8 
pages. Granted, the pages had screen-shots to help users find appropriate 
files and the steps seemed simple-enough but there still seems to be a 
significant difference between half a page and 8 pages. Oh, one 
additional thing: it's noted that the Win95 font named DB-ThaiTextFixed 
is actually a proportional font.

Thanks again for everything!