Ian Tresman's Multilingual PC Directory goes a long way in solving at least the task of discovering whether relevant language support exists. The Directory is available in three formats; as a printed book, on disk as a Windows Help file, and on the World-Wide Web (from where the Windows version may also be downloaded). The book essentially consists of two main sections; detailed descriptions of the products, and profiles of the companies which provide them (including UK distributors where available). Encompassing these two sections are an introduction to multilingual computing and an extensive index. There is also a section detailing some on-line sources, a useful table which places languages with scripts, and a number of character set tables. In all, the book has details of products for over 300 languages whether extinct, written right-to-left, vertical or diagonal, pictographic or accented. Dotted throughout the work are around 90 screen shots of selected products. Compiling details of available software and providers for any directory is a complex and time-consuming task. To produce, however, such an extensive directory for this often confusing and frequently frustrating area is a praiseworthy venture.

The book can be browsed but the reader is advised to begin with the index, which is large -- nearly seventy pages with 19,000 entries. The index appears to have been computer-generated and reminds one of the early computer-generated concordances which reproduced every word in every case and declension. For this reason the work is particularly well-suited to the electronic form where languages, products and companies can be searched with a simple keyword interface. The division in the book between products and company profiles is almost transparent in the disk version. Although it lacks the illustrations and some of the reference data found in the book, the disk version is certainly easier to search. The Web version gives access to hypertext indices of products, languages and company profiles with the added benefit of links to numerous Internet sites. Although the third edition was completed in March 1995 (the Directory first appeared in 1991), printed software guides are notoriously difficult to keep up to date. I suspect that the print version might eventually disappear leaving the disk and on-line versions (which are less expensive for the user and easier for the author to update).

The Directory is not simply a list of fonts or even word processors. The products detailed range from well established packages which are available in a number of languages (there is a Russian version of Pagemaker for example) to dictionaries, spell-checkers, and a selection of further printed guides to language software. Micro-OCP, for example, receives a mention for its claim to support alphabets other than Latin. Some languages, such as Chinese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian as well as western European languages are well documented (as one would expect) whilst others are rather thinly supported. Inconsistencies between the indices and the product descriptions seem to be few and the Directory will be most useful to the isolated scholar who works with complex scripts but little computing support. This is a book recommended for every computer support service likely to be asked questions on fonts and word processors for languages as diverse as Irish, Birhari, Georgian or Sanskrit. I imagine it will be of considerable use to language faculties, and, amongst others, departments of classical and oriental studies.