At 21:47 13/03/02 -0800, Chris Pratley wrote:
>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.
Yes, but the crucial thing is that when the "something" is as unimportant to most ordinary people as Unicode support, then we can't deprive them of our product *as a whole* simply because they don't want to go through an expensive upheaval. "Sorry, you can't use Cardbox on your Windows installation without upgrading Windows, because it wouldn't be able to handle Linear B properly" is not a terribly useful thing to say to a monoglot English-speaker.
>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". :-)
Strictly speaking, I don't actually know *what* I am trying to do for them. I may be trying to give them {insert glowing description of software here}, in which case they don't need to buy anything from you. Or I may be trying to give them {insert glowing description of software here} with support for complex Unicode scripts and supplementary plane characters, in which case it is indeed reasonable to tell them to buy the latest Windows (or just install the latest Office or IE, if it's only the scripts).
Which is all to say that one day the DLLs you mention *will* be "part of Windows" (in about 2005, I reckon), because one day Windows XP will be the oldest version of Windows that one can reasonably expect anyone to have. Until then, we'll need to do the best we can -- which is directly linking to anything that Win98 provides "out of the box" and dynamically linking to the rest, so that if the facility is there then we can use it. This, although a little tedious to program, makes a nice invisible solution: the majority will work quite happily whether or not they have the latest software from MS, and they will automatically get all the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts anyway. Anyone needing something more advanced than that will be *aware* that they have an advanced requirement and may well have upgraded to cope with it already.
Thanks for the hint about the registry key. Anyone know any free font that has some SMP characters in it? It really doesn't matter what they are, because if our program works with one SMP character, it'll work with them all.
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