Re: New MS Mac Office and Unicode?

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Jan 14 2004 - 11:09:08 EST

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    On 14/01/2004 07:33, David Perry wrote:

    >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.
    >
    >
    >
    If they have, yes, this is a great step forward. But Han-Yi has not said
    that they have. He has not even said that the new version of Word is
    "Unicode-based". Deborah Goldsmith has written:

    > 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.

    But I wonder if she actually has information beyond what Han-Yi has
    stated. Indeed *some* "characters that are not part of any Mac OS legacy
    character set" will be supported, as that is required for some of the
    languages Han-Yi lists; but this is clearly not true of *all* such
    characters as RTL and complex script languages are excluded. And all
    that Han-Yi has indicated is support for the rather small number of
    additional characters associated with the keyboards he has listed. He
    has certainly made no mention of any PUA support. (Nor for that matter
    of support for Plane 1 and above.) Unless Deborah actually has further
    information, we are left guessing about anything else.

    >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; ...
    >
    You hope. Han-Yi has not promised support for polytonic Greek
    characters, i.e. those not associated with his modern Greek keyboard. He
    has not promised any improvement in the current limited support for
    Greek and Cyrillic, i.e. restricted to those characters in legacy
    character sets. Or do you have inside information?

    >... I am delighted to see a Unicode-native version of Office come out at long last; ...
    >
    I will be delighted when I see it, but I don't think that Office 2004 is
    really what you are waiting for. Either that, or Han-Yi has been grossly
    under-selling his product.

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter@qaya.org (personal)
    peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
    http://www.qaya.org/
    


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