by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/10/19 10:16 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/10/19/5519238.aspx
Dan asked via the Contact link:
I'm developing a desktop app that needs to display bi-directional text fields and accordingly requires that "Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages" be checked in "supplemental language support".
I saw the post called "Installing supplemental language support programmatically". The article this post points to would technically work, but of course the user would need to load their windows installation disk. I anticipate that this might confuse some users and would really like to avoid it and make the installation of the app as simple as possible.
So...
Is supplemental language support functionality available as a redistributable? If not, would it be ok to deploy the necessary files with my app and make the required registry changes with the installation? Would you be able to provide the detail on which files and registry changes are needed? If not, are there any other ideas?
That post, Installing supplemental language support programatically, has indeed attracted some interest.
Unfortunately, the answer may not be the one people would like to hear....
it is not legal to redistribute pieces of the Windows install, and there is no separate pack for this. The only solution that does not violate the license is for them to have their Windows install disk available in the case where they never installed this support.
Given that the install controlled by those two check boxes quite literally represents millions of dollars in fonts, IMEs, and other content between them, an "easier" solution not involving the customer's original media is really assuming way too much....
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# Anon on 19 Oct 2007 11:27 AM:
And yet on other operating systems they are not afraid even to allow you to download the whole operating system for free. Why don't they care about their million dollars in those cases? They might even allow you to change the interface language of the operating system on the fly. If files are missing they download them from freely accessible servers. Why don't they care about their dollars? Who has paid for their million dollar fonts?
# Michael S. Kaplan on 19 Oct 2007 12:14 PM:
Interestingly, one of the most glaring omissions in those cases is font and rendering support. Mainly because those millions aren't always there to spend, perhaps? :-)