I can see that more than one person doesn't read all of the email on this
list! Anyhow, for anyone who's interested here are the answers to Frank's
questions:
> What about Japanese? CP982 is "Shift JIS". Is there a
> corresponding Windows Code Page for Shift JIS? No, right?
>
The Windows Shift-JIS code page is 932 and has been supported in
East Asian Windows systems ever since these OSs began shipping. It's
supported in Windows 2000 and can run on Western versions of Win9x and
WinNTx (you need to add the language packs).
> Also, I have heard it said that certain Microsoft applications support
> Unicode to some degree. Looking at just Word, WordPad, and NotePad, I
> can see that each of them supports Windows Code pages (e.g. 1252). If
> they also support Unicode (and I presume this would be in UCS-2 or
> UTF-16 form and not UTF-8), how is this done? Is it possible only in
> Windows NT/2000 and not in 95/98/ME? Or, for Word, does it go by Word
> version, rather than OS? For example, I don't see anything about
> Unicode in Word 97. And yet it seems I can paste Unicode text from
> a Browser Window into Word 97 and much of it remains legible (Latin-1,
> Latin-2, Cyrillic, Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Vietnamese). But if I paste
> the same text into WordPad, all the non-ASCII characters are shown as
> (random) CP1252 glyphs.
>
Word 97 was the first version of Word to be based on Unicode. Chris
Pratley has written an extensive history on this to the Unicode List, which
I can send to you if you're interested in the details. Word 2000 has
substantially more Unicode support, e.g., built-in BiDi, and you can expect
ever more support in versions to come.
NotePad and WordPad on Windows 2000 support Unicode including BiDi,
Vietnamese, Devanagari, Tamil, Thai, Korean, simplified and traditional
Chinese, Japanese, Georgian, Armenian, and all common European languages.
The Unicode WordPad/RichEdit/Uniscribe/msls31.dll combination on Windows
2000 runs fine on Win9x as well, but it doesn't currently ship with them (a
version almost as powerful will ship with the next version of Win9x). An
earlier Unicode version (the Office 97 version) of RichEdit ships with
WordPad on Win98, giving that WordPad Western/EastAsian Unicode support, but
no BiDi, except on BiDi-enabled Win98. NotePad has some Unicode support in
previous versions of NT, but only supports BiDi on BiDi enabled versions of
those OSs. NotePad on Win9x has no Unicode support.
Word 2000 and Windows 2000 versions of NotePad and WordPad all
support UTF-8. Windows 2000 NotePad and WordPad both have some support of
UTF-16, but the users must choose the correct font to display nonBMP
characters. Next time around, we'll bind in reasonable fonts in case the
user doesn't specify them (for currently shipped products, no stable fonts
were available in time and the higher-plane code points may still
change...).
Most other major Microsoft applications support Unicode to some
degree, typically including BiDi and East Asian support. At this point it's
rare to find Microsoft applications that aren't based on Unicode internally.
Unicode makes it dramatically easier to create software that runs all around
the world.
> Thanks!
>
> - Frank
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:58 EDT