Question: What are the minimum requirements for using the Russian and Japanese language kits?
Answer: The amount of memory and disk space required varies on Language Kit used and on your configuration. Cyrillic has the smallest RAM requirement (about 500K); Chinese has the greatest (about 1500K). The Apple Language Kits will run on Macintosh IIci computers, or any machine since the Mac Plus. Of course, newer machines are more likely to have 16 MB of RAM available, a minimum for practical usage of a complete system and medium-sized applications.
Question: Will I compromise the effectiveness of these language kits by trying to use them on computers that are already maxed out?
Answer: If the computers are "maxed out", the language kit will probably still run, but performance will be the first thing affected.
Question: In general, what are the advantages to these language kits? If I have installed Russian font on my system, what functionality will be gained if I install the Cyrillic Language Kit?
Answer: Features: standardization, system level support, localized application support.
Standardization:
Apple Computer's fonts are based on the MacCyrillic standard and that allows for the easier document sharing. We provide a keyboard layout which is based on the Cyrillic standards, and transliterated keyboard for people used to U.S. (QWERTY) or French (AZERTY) keyboard layouts.
System Level Support:
Fonts are in the proper ID range so that Mac OS features of the ScriptManager and WorldScript can be used. This means you can (i) click in text of a WorldScript-savvy application and have the font and keyboard synchronize, (ii) use input methods (for double-byte Asian languages -- Japanese, Korean or Chinese) within any application or even in the Finder, and (iii) you can change the font in the Views control panel to display with any Language Kit's font that you have installed.
Localized Application Support:
The Language Kits are the only products on any personal computer system that let the user launch a localized application for a secondary language (that is Japanese or Russian on an English system, or Arabic on a KanjiTalk OS system) and have the menus display properly in the secondary language. Apple Computer provides Russian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian localized versions of SimpleText as examples of this with the Cyrillic Language Kit. (All of the Apple Language Kits include one or more localized applications.)