Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Standard Microsoft Failure

Hmm, this template demands a little bit of separation of text from image. Let's go with a bright pee-coloured background.


Okay, here we go.

For impossibly boring and possibly futile reasons, we need a language pack:



Let's see what the drop-down menu has to offer:



That's right, they aren't in any order, and although the page is in English, you need to be able to spell the script you're going to fuck with. Okay then, that's doable. No we don't want Dari, we want Farsi. (And who decided to make Amharic look shaky enough to be forged from the get-go?) Chosen.



As expected, the page is, irritatingly, in Farsi only, and while our talents with Farsi are legendary, pre-school children run rings around us. So where the fuck's the download button?

Wait, what's that field up there? Bing? Maybe Bing has a translator.



It does! And it tells me to enter a URL! I have one of those right here!



Oh dear, the Microsoft-powered Bing translator cannot handle a goddamned ampersand, a quite common feature of Microsoft URLs on Microsoft-powered websites, and as a result it sends me to the Türkmen language pack. Conveniently, the Türkmen language pack is formatted not-at-all like the page on which the Farsi language pack exists, and therefore cannot be used as a guide to the content of its goddamned fucking sibling webpage.

I wonder if there is some competing company out there with some sort of translaty thingamajig? Oh wait, there is!



Wow! It works fine! Can you believe it? So we download and off we go.

Okay then, let's snag us an Arabic language pack!



Just fuck off.

11 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

A noble effort.

I'm depressed and exhausted just from following along.
~

mikey said...

Because I'm nothing if not helpful...


http://www.libreoffice.org/international-sites/

Substance McGravitas said...

There is a LibreOffice link under the "Free Stuff" section on the right. It gets better and better.

Substance McGravitas said...

But you know, I don't think I'm smart enough to have it at work, so thanks for the reminder...that might be the problem-solver in this case.

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

I get to the "Just fuck off" part of Microsoft much quicker than you do:

"Microsoft...."

"Just fuck off"

Seriously, I force Word and Excel files to open in Numbers and Pages; they retain all the formatting but the programs open WORLDS faster.

Substance McGravitas said...

Unfortunately the office runs on pretty complicated mail-merging and formatting set out in Word, so LibreOffice doesn't work well and reformats some important stuff. Otherwise, yeah, I'd use it all the time.

The only good thing about the iteration of Office that I use is the ability to pare down on-screen cruft to the stuff I actually use.

Substance McGravitas said...

And the zombie should really give LibreOffice a shot. I don't see a reason to buy the mac apps.

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

If I try it, will you be my friend?

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

Groovy. [/Ash]

Smut Clyde said...

And who decided to make Amharic look shaky enough to be forged from the get-go?

I'm not sure if there are any non-shaky versions of the Ge'ez abugiba. Look at the Unicode version:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1200.pdf

It was nice of them to put the macron over the 'a' of 'Maori' but "Reo Maori" is meaningless -- it is "te reo Māori" or nothing.

Substance McGravitas said...

Yes, Amharic can look cleaner with added penmanship.