The other aspect of the real world is that there are old dogs and there
are new tricks, and you can't always get the former to do the latter no
matter how much you wish they could.
If you're trying to offer users something not supported on old systems,
you are going to have to get users to understand versions - there's no
way around it - via manual, error message, whatever. If there is another
solution that does handle what you are trying to do for them, then they
are right to go buy that. It just so happens that that other solution
might be called "latest version of Windows". :-)
FWIW, mshtml.dll v.6 is part of WindowsXP - it is the html rendering
service used by the shell, IE and other apps and applets. IE6 also
installs it. some versions of mshtml.dll v.5.x also support
supplementary characters. Riched20.dll v.4 is available with OfficeXP,
and also ships on the WindowsXp install image I believe.
Display of UTF-16 supplementary characters is supported by the system
renderer only in Windows2000 and WindowsXp, and requires setting a reg
key as detailed in other posts.
Chris
Sent with OfficeXP on WindowsXP
-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Kochanski [mailto:unicode@cardbox.net]
Sent: March 12, 2002 00:04
To: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: RE: Keyboard Layouts for Office XP in Windows 98
At 17:34 11/03/02 -0600, Peter_Constable@sil.org wrote:
>On 03/11/2002 12:58:16 AM "Chris Pratley" wrote:
>
>>While it is true that in terms of absolute numbers most apps do not
yet
>>support UTF-16, it is worth noting that OfficeXP and anything based on
>>mshtml.dll ver.6 (e.g. IE 6) or Riched20.dll v.4 (e.g. Wordpad in
WinXP)
>>do handle surrogate characters from UTF-16 correctly. So in terms of
>>usage, surrogate support is covered pretty well as adoption of these
>>newer versions increases.
>
>But I believe there is another problem: I'm pretty sure that the
TrueType
>rasterisation part of Win9x/Me does not support the newer cmap formats
>that are required to display glyphs for non-BMP characters. So, the
apps
>may understand the characters, but unless they are reading the cmap
tables
>on their own and drawing text as glyph strings, you won't see the
glyphs
>on Win9x/Me.
>
>I expect Chris was assuming Win2K/XP, since it is very definitely a
better
>platform for script support. This issue of support for newer cmap
formats
>is but one reason why.
The trouble is that in the real world no-one uses Win2K/XP. No-one uses
Win9x/Me either. They just use Windows. Ask a user any more than that,
and he'll look blank; insist on an answer, and he'll go off and buy
something else. So we need to be able to run equally well on both
platforms without having to ask.
That said, anyone who uses non-BMP characters will already know that
they all look the same on his system (even if he doesn't know explicitly
that it's 9x/Me), so *in this particular case* we should be able to get
away with it.
Of course, we can't assume mshtml.dll ver.6 or Riched20.dll v.4 or even
Uniscribe, since none of these are part of Windows either...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Mar 14 2002 - 00:12:07 EST