Introduction

InterType is a set of software components allowing Palm powered devices based on Palm OS 5.x (a.k.a. Palm OS Garnet) to display and accept additional alphabets and languages. Only American and Pan-European versions of Palm OS 5.x are supported, due to core differences with the Japanese and Chinese builds of the OS.
Further, not all languages can be added via InterType: the same limitation that had caused the device manufacturer to make separate American and Far East releases is actually preventing from adding Far East languages to a western device (see below).

Note: Due to the application specifics there is no trial download available for the product. Please make sure to read all product features and limitations before placing an order.

InterType Belorussian Localization Kit

Localization is pretty much essential for anyone whose native language is not among the ones built in the original device configuration. Even if you know English or German or Spanish well enough, if you are a native Belorussian speaker, you would likely be receiving emails in Belorussian, reading Belorussian websites and having contacts in Belorussian. Therefore, you would likely need to have Belorussian localization for Palm, not just an application-by-application solution.

Features

• Enhances Palm OS with more languages than available in the stock configuration
• Provides appropriate system fonts for the supported languages (standard, high resolution and Sony CLIE small fonts)
• Provides variety of language-specific alternate keyboards
• Provides proper sorting for the selecting language in applications
• Comes with PalmType, a version of the localization kit for devices running older Palm OS versions (Note that PalmType does not support Turkish and Greek Localizations!)

Supported languages and code pages

• Cyrillic (CP Windows Cyrillic 1251: Belorussian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian)
• Greek (CP 1253: Greek)
• Turkish (CP Latin 5: Turkish)

How does it work?

As of version 5.2 of Palm OS, the American and European Palm OS devices are using a single-byte code page, meaning they can only display and distinguish among 256 unique system characters.

Alternatively, in the Japanese builds of the OS a character is represent by two bytes, allowing for much more unique characters.
Unicode is a standard for using the two bytes to describe a character allowing representation of all world languages; unfortunately, it is not applicable to the American and Pan-European versions of the Palm OS devices.

The lower 128 characters of all code pages, regardless of whether 1 or 2 bytes, are standardized and match the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). This is where the Latin alphabet, the digits, punctuation marks and a few other special characters are.

The upper 128 characters available in a single-byte systems is where usually the alternate languages are.

By default, all Palm devices contain the standardized extended Latin code page. The upper page contains the accented Latin characters used by various Western-European languages like German, French, Italian etc.

Caution: adding any other language (e.g. Russian) to the device is only convenient if it is located at the upper 128 characters of the available system table and as such is only possible at the price of [temporary] losing the characters available there.

The directly viewable result of installing any such localization enhancement on a single-byte system is that some Western-European characters across the device suddenly start looking oddly. It is important to know that it is only the appearance of the documents that is affected (as a result of changing the character glyphs for the upper half of the alphabet); the actual documents are not.

In a nutshell, all localization programs replace several system resources, providing more or less of the functionality needed to read, enter and manipulate (for example sort) alphabets for particular language.