RE: New MS Mac Office and Unicode?

From: Han-Yi Shaw (hanyis@microsoft.com)
Date: Tue Jan 13 2004 - 21:01:59 EST

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    Indeed, as many of you have already heard from our public announcement
    last week, my team has indeed been hard at work making Office for
    Macintosh into a Unicode-throughout suite of applications. Following
    our public announcement, we have seen an overwhelmingly positive
    response from our international and multilingual user base concerning
    our long awaited Unicode support. Since much of this is now public
    information, allow me to share it with you as well.

     

    As noted below, Office 2004 for Macintosh will support the input,
    display, and basic editing of Unicode characters associated with the
    following keyboards (tentative list):

     

    Australian, Austrian, Belgian, Brazilian, British, Bulgarian, Canadian,
    Catalan, Cherokee, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional),
    Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish,
    French, German, Greek, Korean, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic,
    Inuktitut, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian,
    Norwegian, Northern Sami, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian,
    Serbian, Serbian-Latin, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss
    French, Swiss German, Turkish, Ukrainian, Welsh.

     

    Input of the above languages will also be supported through the
    following system-level Unicode input methods: Unicode Hex Input, US
    Extended, and the Character Palette. Additionally, along with Unicode
    versions of such Roman fonts as Times New Roman and Japanese fonts as MS
    Mincho/PMincho, Office 2004 for Macintosh will deliver vastly improved
    layout compatibility and character fidelity with Office for Windows.

     

    Thanks,

    Han-yi

     

    -------------

    hanyishaw
    Program Manager | Word: mac; International Program Manager | Office: mac
    Macintosh Business Unit | Redmond, WA

    Microsoft Corporation

     

     

    -----Original Message-----
    From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On
    Behalf Of Deborah Goldsmith
    Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 11:03 AM
    To: Tom Gewecke
    Cc: unicode@unicode.org
    Subject: Re: New MS Mac Office and Unicode?

     

    On Jan 6, 2004, at 11:48 AM, Tom Gewecke wrote:

    > MS Mac Office 2004 was announced at MacWorld SF today. Does anyone

    > know

    > whether this update finally brings the Unicode capabilities of the

    > WinXP

    > version to the Mac OS X world?

     

    I can now tell you that Mac Office 2004 does offer enhanced support for

    Unicode, in that it can input, edit, and display Unicode characters

    that are not part of any Mac OS legacy character set. I can't say yet

    to what extent the various components of Office support complex shaping

    behavior or bidirectional scripts (e.g., Arabic, Thai, Hindi), because

    I don't know. However, at the very least you will see access to

    expanded CJK repertoires, and access to languages like Icelandic and

    Greek.

     

    Mac Office 2004 will also include fonts with larger repertoires than

    previous versions of Mac Office.

     

    Here are some highlights from the PR information I received:

     

    - Can input, print, and display more than 30 languages

    - Larger font repertoires (e.g., Arial 296 glyphs -> 1192, MS Mincho

    ~9000 glyphs -> 16,031)

    - Japanese fonts included (MS P Mincho and Gothic)

     

    I've been told more details will be discussed in the coming months

    before MS Mac Office 2004 is released. Perhaps some of the Microsoft

    folks on this list can add more details? :-)

     

    Deborah Goldsmith

    Manager, Fonts / Unicode liaison

    Apple Computer, Inc.

    goldsmit@apple.com

     

     

     



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