Accent Professional 2.0 Win
by Pete Cassetta, Alamo PCA

If you've ever tried to use foreign languages under Windows, you know that this can be a real challenge. Even with the recent improvements in Windows 95, Windows' multilingual capability still feels like an afterthought. The same is unfortunately true for most Windows application programs.

Accent Professional 2.0 is a refreshing change from this norm. Designed from the ground up as a word processor for multilingual users, Accent provides excellent support for Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, Turkish, and the languages of western and eastern Europe.

General Features

Accent is a special-purpose word processor, so as you might expect, it can't really match the features of the big three (Word, WordPerfect, and Word Pro). It does have quite a few features though, including headers and footers, page numbering, insertion of graphics, mail merge, paragraph and character styles, spell checking, thesaurus lookup, and tables. Some significant missing features include OLE, index and table of contents generation, footnotes and endnotes, document comparison and revision, and grammar checking. I could live with Accent for small documents like letters and faxes, but it isn't really up to doing long structured documents like manuals or textbooks.

Accent closely mimics Word for Windows 2.0 in look, feel, and conceptual design. Word users will be able to adjust to Accent quite easily. Accent's features are well conceived, and there are a number of nice touches which add convenience to the task of word processing. For example, its toolbar contains a font box. When you click the down arrow to change fonts, you'll find the list arranged by character set (i.e. all the Greek fonts are together, as are all the Turkish fonts, etc.), and a small window opens to show you a font sample as you scroll the list.

Multilingual Features

Accent's multilingual features are what really set it apart. You can specify which language is used for menus, dialogs, and online help. You can change this language setting at any time as you are working.

You can also set the language for each portion of your document's text. When you do so, the keyboard layout changes and so does the font (if necessary). The spell checker, thesaurus, and hyphenation utilities are all sensitive to the language setting of the text. This makes it easy to spell check a multilingual document; the spell checker automatically changes dictionaries as necessary as it moves through the document.

Accent comes with nice TrueType fonts from the URW foundry. There are matching fonts in Times, Sans, and Courier typefaces for the following character sets: Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Cyrillic, Greek, and Turkish. This enables you to write a wide variety of languages using consistent-looking fonts.

Arabic and Hebrew have unusual writing systems. Vowels are mostly written as marks above or below other letters, and text flows from right to left. Accent handles Arabic and Hebrew quite elegantly. Fonts are provided for these languages, as are a variety of keyboard layouts. The flow direction (left to right or right to left) can be specified for characters, paragraphs, columns, and tables. By default, it will be right to left for Arabic and Hebrew, and left to right for all other languages.

Extras

Accent includes a number of goodies that make this package an outstanding value. Some of these are general purpose, and others are specifically for multilingual computing. General purpose goodies include Lotus Organizer 2.0 (a personal information manager), Delrina WinFax Lite 4.0 (a fax utility), and a nice collection of about 100 Bitstream TrueType fonts in the normal Windows character set (for Western Europe). Multilingual goodies include the KeyMaps utility and the Berlitz Interpreter.

KeyMaps provides an on-screen display of the active keyboard layout as you use Accent. If you like, you can use your mouse to insert characters by clicking on keys. A large number of keyboard layouts are available, but you can't customize them or use them with any program other than Accent.

The Berlitz Interpreter translates words between five languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. You can lookup a word from any of these languages, and you will see the result in the other four languages. If more than one word could be used to translate the target word, you can click on a "more" button to see the additional possibilities. There is also a quiz feature that picks a word at random and lets you try to translate it yourself. You can click the "translate" button to compare your result with that of the program.

System Requirements, Performance

Accent has a wonderful manual. It assumes very little background knowledge, and presents a brief but thorough introduction to all features of the program. It is well-organized and indexed, and reads very easily. Online help is similarly well-written, and available in nine different languages.
System requirements are Windows 3.1 or later, a 386 or higher processor, 4 MB RAM, and 6-46 MB disk space. I tested Accent under Windows 3.1 and 95, using a 386 with 8 MB of memory. Performance was acceptable, even on this slow computer, but certain parts of the program appear to need better optimization. For example, it takes a long time to move to the end of a large document. Most other word processors will do this instantaneously. Tables are also slow to work with. Accent often redraws the entire table, even if only one row has been changed.

Conclusions

There are three basic approaches to multilingual computing under Windows. The first is to purchase system-wide utilities such as font and keyboard support. This route is inexpensive and has the advantage of enabling you to use the supported languages in just about any Windows program.

The second option is to purchase language add-ons for particular programs you use regularly, such as your word processor. These add-ons usually cost about $75, and provide you with spell-checking, thesaurus, hyphenation, and possibly grammar checking in a certain language. If you only need to buy the add-on for one language, this is a good, medium-priced option. If you need support for several languages, this gets expensive quickly.

The final option is to buy Accent Professional, and use it for your multilingual word processing.

System-wide utilities are a good option for most users, simply because if you work in multiple languages, sooner or later you'll want to use these languages in programs other than your word processor (e-mail, desktop publisher, database, spreadsheet, etc.). If you use just one language besides English (e.g. Spanish), then I think it makes sense to buy an add-on for your normal word processor. But for users who need to work in Arabic or Hebrew, or who need to use several different languages, Accent Professional is a great choice. It would be ideal for a school computer lab, a translation company, or a business specializing in international trade.