Scripsit Peter:If they have, yes, this is a great step forward. But Han-Yi has not said that they have. He has not even said that the new version of Word is "Unicode-based". Deborah Goldsmith has written:
This tentative list doesn't look to be very much of an improvement on the current situation.
I must respectfully disagree. Previous versions of Mac Word have NOT been Unicode-based. This means that Mac users could not take advantage of the many existing Unicode TrueType fonts; in my own case, I have a number of characters in the PUA that are important to me. If MS has rewritten the basic code so that this and future versions can use Unicode, that is a great step forward.
Mac Office 2004 does offer enhanced support for Unicode, in that it can input, edit, and display Unicode characters that are not part of any Mac OS legacy character set.
But I wonder if she actually has information beyond what Han-Yi has stated. Indeed *some* "characters that are not part of any Mac OS legacy character set" will be supported, as that is required for some of the languages Han-Yi lists; but this is clearly not true of *all* such characters as RTL and complex script languages are excluded. And all that Han-Yi has indicated is support for the rather small number of additional characters associated with the keyboards he has listed. He has certainly made no mention of any PUA support. (Nor for that matter of support for Plane 1 and above.) Unless Deborah actually has further information, we are left guessing about anything else.
For languages such as polytonic Greek (I assume "Greek" in the list refers to modern Greek) and Cyrillic, it's only a matter of adding a keyboard; ...You hope. Han-Yi has not promised support for polytonic Greek characters, i.e. those not associated with his modern Greek keyboard. He has not promised any improvement in the current limited support for Greek and Cyrillic, i.e. restricted to those characters in legacy character sets. Or do you have inside information?
... I am delighted to see a Unicode-native version of Office come out at long last; ...I will be delighted when I see it, but I don't think that Office 2004 is really what you are waiting for. Either that, or Han-Yi has been grossly under-selling his product.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
