Last night, I received the following question in e-mail:

Dear Michael.

I wonder if you can clarify this matter.
I was under the impression that Tamil Unicode was possible only under XP professional, - since regional lang settings are available in the Control Panel.
Yesterday I bought a new laptop that came with XP home edition. The regional language settings  was not available initially. I was disappointed and thought of upgrading to XP pro. But I went to the Help Button and saw a link that installed the regional lang setting. I was able to set up Tamil Unicode settings and I am now happily using Tamil Unicode in the preinstalled Microsoft Works..
The query is how come there is this impression that only Windows 2000 and XP pro support (Tamil)Unicode??

Thank you  for your time

Kalaimani
Singapore

I reassured him of one important fact here -- that every version of Windows 2000, Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, and Windows Server 2003 contains all of the international support, no matter what localized version the SKU is.

So if you have XP Home then you have the support for Tamil, Georgian, Punjabi, Russian, Greek, Traditional Chinese, Bulgarian, Afrikaans, Catalan, Korean, Basque, Vietnamese, Spanish, Thai, French, Hindi, Japanese, Belorussian, Icelandic, Farsi, Galician, Danish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Simplified Chinese, Swedish, Konkani, Italian, German, Hungarian, Armenian, Konkani, Lithuanian, Divehi, Swahili, Czech, Dutch, Hebrew, Estonian, Gujarati, and all of the rest of them.

You may have to install the proper international support to get the language (and some on this list are only available in XP and later), but they are all there waiting for you to use them. Today!

 

This post brought to you by "ஶ" (U+0bb6, TAMIL LETTER SHA)
Recently (as of Unicode 4.1) added to Unicode based on a proposal by INFITT (International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil)