In general, this series of articles refers to documents that are prepared in English. That does indeed handle a large percentage of the newsletters that are issued every year, but not all of them.

Some of us prepare documents in languages other than English, or use a character set that differs from the standard non-inflected American English font. In such cases, it may be advisable to use a program other than Publisher or one of the other popular programs. Let's analyze the reasons:

First of all, when Publisher is installed on a localized version of Windows, such as Hebrew, it sometimes tries to create a partially localized menu. It inserts selected Hebrew translations or equivalents for File, Edit, and so on.

Although this may look cute when you see it the first time, your initial feelings will fade rapidly when trying to use the program. That Hebrew intrusion sometimes limits, restricts, or even blocks some of the important features. In one Hebrew system, the Windows Print feature was disabled by the Hebrew. Imagine working on a great newsletter, only to discover that you can't publish it after all your effort. It would not even allow the user to export the work to another program or to a file.

The bottom line is clear: Use these programs for English work, and do not use untested special symbols. If you do want to insert special symbols or foreign language characters, then test them before investing time and energy in your newsletter. Successive versions of Publisher seem to have handled some of the problems faced by its predecessor regarding the printing of symbols, but they may still problematic. This may be corrected when Unicode is fully impleneted, but that is still a distant dream.

Click here for the next article in this series on desktop publishing.