On Dec 4, 2003, at 11:12 AM, Michael Everson wrote:
At 17:41 +0000 2003-12-04, Raymond Mercier wrote:Well can we be perfectly clear about this: I read that OS X is Unicode compliant, yet I understand you to say that Word (as part of Office) on OS X is not. If that is true of Word on OS X then I am surprised - even amazed, but that seems to be what you said. Is it really the case that characters in Word in OS X are not stored as Unicode, even though they are so stored in Word in Windows NT (and later) on a PC ? If not stored as Unicode on a Mac, then how are they stored ?
Apparently Mac Roman. I don't know. Ask Microsoft.
Office uses Unicode internally, and Mac Office files are binary-compatible with Windows Office files.
For *drawing* and *input*, Office on the Mac is limited to that portion of Unicode which doesn't require complex or bidi layout, and which is covered by one of the old Mac scripts. This pretty much means Latin, Cyrillic, and East Asia, although their coverage of East Asia is pretty spotty.
The Office people are perfectly aware that this isn't an ideal solution. Whether or not they're working on it, I cannot say. Their problem is that over the last couple of years, they've had two major transitions to make: one to use Carbon (so that they can run on X), and one to use Apple's Unicode-drawing engine (or some derivative of it). They've done the former, and no doubt at some point will attempt the latter.
This is true for most producers of existing programs, BTW. The oldest date back to several years before Unicode and so have had to undertake three major rewrites: one to use Unicode for text storage and processing, one to use Carbon to run on X, and one to use the new Unicode-drawing APIs. That's a lot of work. And there's been a certain hesitance, too, because the earlier versions of Unicode-drawing on the Mac were slow, although that's improved substantially in 10.3.
It's no coincidence that the bulk of applications which support Unicode on the Mac are new ones. They don't have to rewrite anything.
It's also no coincidence that the applications which have their own internal text-rendering engines (e.g., Office and Adobe's applications) have lagged in getting Unicode display.
======== John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/
