RE: Twinbridge & Word 2000

[Chris Pratley]

There are quite a few sorts of problems you can have when using products such as TwinBridge with Unicode-based applications, and these can be further complicated if you also change the operating system.   TwinBridge and similar “shell” software (e.g. RichWin, Chinese Star) were developed several years ago primarily to deliver Chinese language processing capability to systems and products that did not otherwise support it. This support was accomplished through a variety of unstable hacks and unsupported hooks in the Windows display code. The problems resulting include system instability (these products often replace core system dlls, which is a disaster if you have a newer version of Windows than the product was designed for, not to mention the likelihood that serious bugs were introduced), file incompatibility (use of the product creates files that cannot be read by users who do not also use the shell), �and incompatibility for version upgrades, such as when Word97 reads Word95 files, etc.   Current products (such as Windows2000 and Office2000) fully support Chinese natively, so there is no need for these sorts of “enabling” shell programs any more. This leaves two issues: 1.       Users may still want TwinBridge-style programs for the other features they include (for example, a favoured input method or a dictionary). Unfortunately, even though all language versions of Windows2000 now have extensible system services to support all of the features these products try to provide (such as Chinese input), most of these products still use their private systems and APIs. The result is usually a lot of incompatibilities between their products and new versions of Windows, since they are not using supported system services which are guaranteed to work in new releases of the OS. To resolve these sorts of incompatibilities, you should contact the maker of the enabling software (TwinBridge in this case) 2.       These days an increasingly common issue is how to stop relying on these products since their core feature (input and display of Chinese) is now available as a system service and the most commonly used applications are Unicode enabled and therefore support Chinese. Most of these “shell” vendors provide tools for repairing text in files created in non-Unicode applications using their system after the files are read into Unicode applications. You can use these to migrate your files to a Unicode format which then does not require the “enabling” shell to be displayed and edited correctly. Word2000 and PowerPoint2000 include an option to help import older files created under these shells. (make sure Chinese is enabled for editing in the Office Language Settings applet, then in Word got to “Tools/Options/General/English Word 6.0/95 documents contain”, and select Chinese. In PowerPoint, go to Tools/Options/Asian/Convert font-associated text”)   Chris Pratley Group Program Manager Microsoft Word       -----Original Message----- From: Magda Danish (Unicode) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: June 27, 2000 9:51 AM To: Unicode List Subject: Twinbridge & Word 2000     -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2000 5:13 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: any question To whom may concern:           Here in the Universitat Au�noma de Barcelona. We have carried out a software upgrading with which we ecountred some problems.There seams to be a problem of compatibility between the software Twinbridge (Windows 95) an Word 2000 (Windows 2000) with the asian writing (chinese).         Word 2000 does not recognise chinese capturer from Twinbridge, probably because Windows 2000 works with Unicode fonts, while Twinbridge works with True Type. The question is: Is there any way for making True type fonts and Unicode compatible.