Other systems allow you to build multilingual capabilities into your programs--for example, by using a tool such as the Macintosh Script Manager or by manipulating multiple code pages. The text storage mechanism in the CommonPoint application system, however, provides this support to your applications transparently with no additional programming effort.

Unlike some systems, the natural language identifier is independent from the font information for all character data. This is because Unicode provides a unique encoding for every character in each script, regardless of whether a character appears in multiple scripts. For example, the Roman, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts all contain the character A, but Unicode contains a different encoding for the character A in each of these three scripts. Therefore, the script to which a character belongs is inherent in the character itself.

The editable text document component extends multilingual text support by providing interfaces that allow you to display and edit multilingual text. You need only to make sure that you have a font installed for each script you want to display and a typing configuration installed for each language you want to enter from the keyboard. Semantic information attached to each Unicode character helps the system decide how to present the text--for example, whether character sequences should be displayed horizontally or vertically.