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1. Introduction

The Asia-Pacific Parliamentary Forum (APPF) is now undertaking a plan to promote information exchange among legislatures. The APPF general assembly, held in Korea, in January 1998, adopted a resolution concerning this plan, which was named the "Asia-Pacific Open Information Network (APOINT 2001)". During the executive committee meeting in Peru, September 1998, the APPF technical working group met and discussed the issue.

Japan, as part of the APOINT 2001 project, has made efforts to develop a multilingual network environment, and here we present a testing version of the application.

1.1 Background and Objectives

Today, parliaments of the Asia-Pacific nations run a homepage, where they distribute information concerning their activities. The ability to refer to the information, technology standards and software and other forms of shared resources is presupposed. Above all things, alphabets and characters cause a big problem. Computer systems are adapted (localized) according to the local language, and to reproduce different character sets other than their own on an ordinary personal computer is not an easy task.

The multilingual software we introduce here enables localized computers, according to the local language environment, to display the Japanese language. This tool is accompanied by:

  1. a free font resource which contains the Japan Industrial Standards characters, and
  2. a set of tools which add multilingual capability to the localized web browser.
This software has been developed under the initiative of the Japanese secretariat of the APPF, and it can be downloaded at the APPF Japan web site free of charge.

1.2 Software Development

This software package was designed by the Asia-Pacific Free Font Study Group (AP Font SG) under the contract of the Japanese secretariat of the APPF. The AP Font SG is hosted by the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM) of the International University of Japan. As a research institution of the social sciences, GLOCOM has, since its foundation in 1991, regarded it as part of its duty to internationally provide information on Japanese society, a task which eventually took advantage of the Internet. As we continued our activities, we came to face a number of requests concerning multilingual processing of electronic document on the network from domestic and international users. In particular, international users are in need of the fonts and tools necessary to read information in Japanese.

In order to address this problem, GLOCOM organized a joint-research collaboration project, called the 'Open Electronic Document Committee', in which linguists, network engineers, experts in standardization, and editors are involved.

1.3 Members of the Asia-Pacific Free Font Study Group

Chair
Yushi Komachi, Ph.D (Matsushita Graphic Communication Systems, Inc.)
Members
Shuji Matsushita (Professor, Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
Junichi Hamada (Directer, Institute of Socio-Information and Communication Studies, University of Tokyo)
Gen Nagamura (Operating Officer, Seoul Systems Co., Ltd.)
Akinori Okubo (Manager, Research and Development Center, Ricoh C