4. System Implementation

4.1 The Design concept

There is a great diversity of languages and scripts in Asia-Pacific region. But there is still a limited availability of communication tools on the internet for peoples in the region. As its final goal, our project aims to provide language-independent communication tools for users with any language requirements in the region. These kind of tools will have multilingual capability and will provide a bridge between any two users with different languages and scripts in the region.

This report is prepared as the first step in our efforts towards this goal. The system described in this report is designed to provide a minimum communication tool, for users in the region who want to communicate by their own languages and scripts. Although the system does not have multilingual capability, it can handle any language and script by switching the code tables of the system. This report does not include code tables. We are expecting that relevant authorities will provide their code tables.

4.2 System structure

The system structure is shown in Figure 4.1. Its implementation is based on the requirements for supporting the environments:

originator: Japan
recipient: Peru
language of recipient: Japanese
operating system: Spanish OS

Figure 4.1

Documents are described in HTML and interchanged in the system. Its major purpose is to forward a great number of stored legacy documents without any additional processing and to receive them, preserving their formatting style and font rendering.

4.2.1 Key component

The major functionality of the system is incorporated in its receiving end. A conventional browser may incorrectly render the documents which contain other language(s) than English and other optionally specified ones, since the browser does not always support the characters/glyphs and fonts for those languages which the originator wishes.

This system introduces a utility software for switching character/glyph sets with their appropriate fonts' data. The software is obtained by downloading via the Internet.

The utility software can identify the coded character sets of received documents and let the documents be processed with the identified character and embedded font resources in order to make a correct rendering.

4.2.2 Specification of utility software

environment

- MS Windows 95 or MS Windows 3.1
- hard disk area more than 12MB
- CD-ROM

support application

- Netscape Navigator 2.0 or higher
- MS Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher
- Lotus cc:Mail 1.12 or higher
- Eudora 2.2 or higher

operation

- Select the language switch on the popup menu to get the desired language support.

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