The other aspect of the real world is that there are old dogs and there are new tricks, and you can't always get the former to do the latter no matter how much you wish they could.
If you're trying to offer users something not supported on old systems, you are going to have to get users to understand versions - there's no way around it - via manual, error message, whatever. If there is another solution that does handle what you are trying to do for them, then they are right to go buy that. It just so happens that that other solution might be called "latest version of Windows". :-) FWIW, mshtml.dll v.6 is part of WindowsXP - it is the html rendering service used by the shell, IE and other apps and applets. IE6 also installs it. some versions of mshtml.dll v.5.x also support supplementary characters. Riched20.dll v.4 is available with OfficeXP, and also ships on the WindowsXp install image I believe. Display of UTF-16 supplementary characters is supported by the system renderer only in Windows2000 and WindowsXp, and requires setting a reg key as detailed in other posts. Chris Sent with OfficeXP on WindowsXP -----Original Message----- From: Martin Kochanski [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: March 12, 2002 00:04 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Keyboard Layouts for Office XP in Windows 98 At 17:34 11/03/02 -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >On 03/11/2002 12:58:16 AM "Chris Pratley" wrote: > >>While it is true that in terms of absolute numbers most apps do not yet >>support UTF-16, it is worth noting that OfficeXP and anything based on >>mshtml.dll ver.6 (e.g. IE 6) or Riched20.dll v.4 (e.g. Wordpad in WinXP) >>do handle surrogate characters from UTF-16 correctly. So in terms of >>usage, surrogate support is covered pretty well as adoption of these >>newer versions increases. > >But I believe there is another problem: I'm pretty sure that the TrueType >rasterisation part of Win9x/Me does not support the newer cmap formats >that are required to display glyphs for non-BMP characters. So, the apps >may understand the characters, but unless they are reading the cmap tables >on their own and drawing text as glyph strings, you won't see the glyphs >on Win9x/Me. > >I expect Chris was assuming Win2K/XP, since it is very definitely a better >platform for script support. This issue of support for newer cmap formats >is but one reason why. The trouble is that in the real world no-one uses Win2K/XP. No-one uses Win9x/Me either. They just use Windows. Ask a user any more than that, and he'll look blank; insist on an answer, and he'll go off and buy something else. So we need to be able to run equally well on both platforms without having to ask. That said, anyone who uses non-BMP characters will already know that they all look the same on his system (even if he doesn't know explicitly that it's 9x/Me), so *in this particular case* we should be able to get away with it. Of course, we can't assume mshtml.dll ver.6 or Riched20.dll v.4 or even Uniscribe, since none of these are part of Windows either...
