Newbie Question on Multilingual Typing

[yitb...@my-dejanews.com]

Hi,
I am very unfamiliar with multilingual computing and would like to get answers
to some basic questions. Perhaps the best way is to describe what I want.

I would like to enter Ethiopic characters on standard office-type software.
The Ethiopic character set has around 350 characters, give or take some
uncommon ones. Assume I have a font with these 350 characters. What I want
to do is map the qwerty keyboard I'm using to this font set. BTW, I do
understand that this is just an instance of the general problem of mapping
the keyboard to a font greater than the ASCII set size.

(A note about Ethiopic--most of the characters represent sounds consisting of
a consonant followed by a vowel. Ethiopic has one character for 'bi', one
for 'ko', another for 'ka', etc.).

For example, I want to enter 'be' (the character 'b', followed by the
character 'e') and have a corresponding single Ethiopic appear.

I need to switch typing between Ethiopic and English sometimes, so I need to
be able to switch modes so that typing 'be' will display 'be'.

I also want to be able to change the mapping. For example, I want be able to
change the result of typing 'be'.

There is Ethiopic software on the market that does most of the above. They
run in the background, let you type in virtually any application, and have an
"on/off" switch.

But I have some problems/questions about these applications:

1. I have not found any that will run on NT. The reason has something to
do with UniCode, eight bit, etc. that I don't understand. Are there NT
security reasons, also?

2. They don't let you define your own mapping. I would have thought there
must be some software that allows you make your own mapping to any font and
use it in the form described above. Is there?

Thanks,
Salaam Yitbarek

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[Mutarjm]

Salaam...denestaling?

Today is Wednesday, July 22d.

You might contact Dr. Aberra MOLLA, who has developed English <-> Amharic
software.
His e-mail address is < ethi...@aol.com >

His web site URL is:

< http://www.ethiopic.com >

He should be able to advise and assisst you about any Amharic products that
will run in MS Windows 95 or NT.

HTH.

Regards from Los Angeles,

Mutarjm