...This tentative list doesn't look to be very much of an improvement on the current situation. Chinese and Japanese have been added, plus Cherokee and Inuktitut for some strange reason (I'm sure they are not more important commercially than Arabic). I thought Korean hadn't, then found it out of alphabetical order. But otherwise it looks as if Office 2004 will still be restricted to just some of the ISO 8859 character sets and to languages which use them. That means (others have pointed out some of these) no support for Arabic script, Hebrew script (so I guess the Israeli government's boycott of Microsoft will continue), Indian scripts, SE Asian scripts including Thai, central Asian Latin or Cyrillic scripts, Ethiopic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, IPA, etc etc. Not all of these exceptions can be justified on the grounds of complexity e.g. for Central Asia just a handful of extra characters are required with no complex properties - the main problem is that they are not in already well defined code pages.
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.
But then it is hardly in Microsoft's commercial interests to enourage use of MacOS in regions like SE Asia where Windows is now dominant, although strongly challenged by Linux.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
