Week of Tips on WEPOS Localization and International Language Support

It is such great news that the recently released WEPOS 1.1 Update expands WEPOS support for localized (non-English) user interfaces from 7 to 32 languages; the same set of languages that Windows XP Multlingual User Interface (MUI) pack supports. The greater language support enables deployment of WEPOS into many new markets. However, dealing with language support on WEPOS in general can be a bit of a headache sometimes. To help ease your day in this international world, I'm going to be posting 1 tip each day this week – so keep your eye out for more!

Tip #1 - The OC:

Understanding what each WEPOS language Optional Component (OC) contains is very valuable knowledge. There are 2 groups of language OCs in WEPOS: Language Support OCs and Language Pack OCs.

The Language Support OCs are: Additional Input Device Support OC, Additional Codepage Support OC, and Additional Font Support OC. They provide, respectively, input devices (keyboards, IMEs, etc.), codepages, and fonts for all locales available with Windows XP Professional SP2. Unless you just need one of these OCs, you should install all three at the same time. If you do not install any of these OCs, you will end up getting support for input devices, codepages, and fonts for the default European locales. This is the same set that you would get on Windows XP Professional SP2 without installing the optional support for East Asian Languages and the optional support for Complex Languages.

There are 7 Language Pack OCs for the 7 originally (since WEPOS 1.0) supported localized user interface languages: German, Italian, France, Spanish, Korean, Chinese Simplified, and Japanese. These OCs not only contain the localized user interface of their respective languages, but also contain input devices, codepages and fonts for those languages as well. For example, the same set of fonts for Japanese language exists in both the Japanese Language Pack OC and the Additional Font Support OC.

- Pawin