smelik wrote:
>Thanks - that is a clear explanation. I suppose, then, that lack of Apple
>support was a poor excuse for the lack of multiscript/bidirectional use?
>That the real reason is an evaluation of time investment versus perceived
>advantages? Sad for me personally, because in everything else (especially
>the database) I like PM best.
OK, here is the complete explanation:
Mac OS used to support a variety of system scripts, including hebrew and
arabic, in Mac OS 7, 8 and 9. Then Mac OS X came, and the support of
these scripts for carbon applications has been totally dropped, except
for chinese, japanese and korean. With 10.2 (or 10.1, I don't remember),
the support of many scripts is back in carbon, but requires to use a
unicode based text engine. Apple provides a carbon unicode text engine
(MLTE), but it is not flexible enough to be used in PowerMail (no way to
highlight URLS, quoted text, insert an object like our short header, use
OS X's spell checker etc). Additionally, MLTE is not widely adopted by
developers, which means that Apple will probably not invest much time to
make it evolve, and could also stop to support it at all (remember
PowerTalk, QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc, HTMLRendering, AIAT... to name a few
technologies that Apple abandoned).
So, the only solution to support semitic languages (and others) in carbon
is to write a unicode text engine using low level unicode carbon APIS
like ATSUI (but CTM is not in the business of writing text engines), or
wait that either Apple or a third party developer make a good unicode
text engine available for carbon applications, which may finally happen
one day.
Jérôme - PowerMail Engineering
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