From: David Perry (hospes.primus@verizon.net)
Date: Wed Jan 14 2004 - 10:33:23 EST
Scripsit Peter:
> This tentative list doesn't look to be very much of an improvement on the current situation.
I must respectfully disagree. Previous versions of Mac Word have NOT been Unicode-based. This means that Mac users could not take advantage of the many existing Unicode TrueType fonts; in my own case, I have a number of characters in the PUA that are important to me. If MS has rewritten the basic code so that this and future versions can use Unicode, that is a great step forward.
For languages such as polytonic Greek (I assume "Greek" in the list refers to modern Greek) and Cyrillic, it's only a matter of adding a keyboard; some of these already exist, such as GreeKeys for the Mac, and the XML specification to make them is publicly available.
I do understand that it's disappointing when a new release comes out without features that one is particularly interested in (having been in that position myself). Keeping in mind that support for Arabic and Indic languages would add a great deal of complexity to the project (particularly since Mac OS X does not support OpenType), I am delighted to see a Unicode-native version of Office come out at long last; it lays the foundation for future developments.
David
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