On Tue, 5 Aug 1997, Zhenbin Xu wrote:
> However, I just wondering why Microsoft
> maintains two version of Microsoft Word, one for LR languages, one for BiDi
> languages, in stead of putting everything together. The folks developed
> Word certainly can come up with a very clever design.
This may be part of a successive unification of various versions,
now having it down to two, and later only one. Or it may be a
reflection of the fact that while for keyboarding and display
of plain text, handled more and more by the OS, a general
solution is already available or may be available soon,
this is not the case when it comes to user interface and
interaction issues and higher-quality text processing as
provided by an application such as Word. In particular, while
the backstore->display conversion for Bidi text is exactly
specified in the Unicode algorithm, there are extremely many
variants for things such as cursor placement and behaviour,
addition of explicit bidi controls,... So Bidi Word may have
a lot more options and menu points for these things, which would
only disturb a non-bidi user.
Regards, Martin.
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