RE: New MS Mac Office and Unicode?

[Han-Yi Shaw]

Indeed, as many of you have already heard from our public announcement last week, my team has indeed been hard at work making Office for Macintosh into a Unicode-throughout suite of applications.  Following our public announcement, we have seen an overwhelmingly positive response from our international and multilingual user base concerning our long awaited Unicode support.  Since much of this is now public information, allow me to share it with you as well.   As noted below, Office 2004 for Macintosh will support the input, display, and basic editing of Unicode characters associated with the following keyboards (tentative list):   Australian, Austrian, Belgian, Brazilian, British, Bulgarian, Canadian, Catalan, Cherokee, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Korean, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Inuktitut, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Northern Sami, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Serbian-Latin, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss French, Swiss German, Turkish, Ukrainian, Welsh.   Input of the above languages will also be supported through the following system-level Unicode input methods: Unicode Hex Input, US Extended, and the Character Palette.   Additionally, along with Unicode versions of such Roman fonts as Times New Roman and Japanese fonts as MS Mincho/PMincho, Office 2004 for Macintosh will deliver vastly improved layout compatibility and character fidelity with Office for Windows.   Thanks, Han-yi   ------------- hanyishaw Program Manager | Word: mac; International Program Manager | Office: mac Macintosh Business Unit | Redmond, WA Microsoft Corporation     -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Deborah Goldsmith Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 11:03 AM To: Tom Gewecke Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: New MS Mac Office and Unicode?   On Jan 6, 2004, at 11:48 AM, Tom Gewecke wrote: > MS Mac Office 2004 was announced at MacWorld SF today.  Does anyone > know > whether this update finally brings the Unicode capabilities of the > WinXP > version to the Mac OS X world?   I can now tell you that 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. I can't say yet to what extent the various components of Office support complex shaping behavior or bidirectional scripts (e.g., Arabic, Thai, Hindi), because I don't know. However, at the very least you will see access to expanded CJK repertoires, and access to languages like Icelandic and Greek.   Mac Office 2004 will also include fonts with larger repertoires than previous versions of Mac Office.   Here are some highlights from the PR information I received:   - Can input, print, and display more than 30 languages - Larger font repertoires (e.g., Arial 296 glyphs -> 1192, MS Mincho ~9000 glyphs -> 16,031) - Japanese fonts included (MS P Mincho and Gothic)   I've been told more details will be discussed in the coming months before MS Mac Office 2004 is released. Perhaps some of the Microsoft folks on this list can add more details? :-)   Deborah Goldsmith Manager, Fonts / Unicode liaison Apple Computer, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED]