Feature Review: Multi-language Support

The March 2011 Edition of SongShow Plus marks the beginning of efforts to provide support for non-English languages. While the user interface is still all-English, a few new enhancements have been made to support the use of non-English languages for song lyrics and slide text.

Spell Check
For editing slide text and song lyrics, you now have the capability to select from a number of languages for the interactive spell checker. You can also have multiple languages selected at one time. Additionally, the settings for slide text can be different than the settings for song lyrics.

Alphabetic Search
If you are entering songs that use alphabets other than English (basic Latin), then you will also want to be able to find these songs if their titles start with these other letters. SongShow Plus now lets you specify one or more alphabets for use in the song database panel. By letting you select multiple alphabets, you can search for songs even if a mix of languages are used. This is done by providing controls wihtin the panel for each alphabet selected.

These new settings can be found in Tools > Preferences. There are three new sections: Song Database Panel, Spell Check-Slides, and Spell Check-Songs.

Right-to-Left Text
SongShow Plus will now render text that is entered as Right-to-Left text correct (at least in most cases). This is handy if you want to insert Hebrew words into a slide. Using the keyboard language mechanism built into Windows, you can switch between English and Hebrew (or any other language for that matter) with a click of a mouse.

There is still work to do for more complete language support, but this is good start.

(BE256)