From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Jan 14 2004 - 14:44:43 EST
On 14/01/2004 10:31, C J Fynn wrote:
>
> It looks, from this list, like most of the pre-composed Latin
> characters will be supported (though no mention of Vietnamese) as
> will Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese & Korean scripts. Since non of
> the listed languages need to use combining characters, I take it that
> it is unlikely there are plans to support
> these in this release. The biggest holes in the list seem to
> be languages
> which use Arabic, Hebrew, all the Indic scripts and all SE Asian
> scripts.
>
> So, I think this can be read as "there will be support for Unicode but
> there
> will be no support for complex-script layout"
>
> - Chris
>
No mention either of Azerbaijani (Latin or Cyrillic), Kazakh, or any
minority languages of the CIS; nor of anything African. This suggests to
me that support of Latin and Cyrillic (probably of Greek too) is
restricted to the characters in predefined character sets.
Perhaps I should explain a bit in case some people find me needlessly
negative. As I understand it, the existing Mac Word uses Unicode
internally, and for its storage format which is compatible with that of
Word for Windows. But there are two major limitations. The first is with
keyboarding. The second is that the only Unicode characters which can be
displayed (even in documents prepared on Windows and opened on the Mac)
are those included in certain pre-defined character sets, because the
rendering engine maps characters into those sets for rendering.
It seems to me, from what I have seen promised for Office 2004, that
Microsoft is making major improvements in the former area, which may
allow any Unicode character to be entered, and these changes are very
welcome. But there is no sign or suggestion of major changes to the
rendering engine. All I see suggested is some minor changes around the
edges, perhaps to squeeze a few extra characters into the existing
charater sets, perhaps to include a few extra character sets. But unless
the restriction to predefined and mostly small character sets has been
lifted (and there is no sign that it has), the only characters which can
be rendered are those in a rather limited subset, not even including all
precomposed Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, and certainly not including PUA.
All other characters, if entered, will be displayed as boxes, or
question marks or something. As I said before, I hope I'm wrong, but I
won't expect major changes to the rendering engine unless there is some
indication from Microsoft that it is on the way.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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