It looks, from this list, like most of the pre-composed Latin characters will be supported (though no mention of Vietnamese) as will Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese & Korean scripts. Since non of the listed languages need to use combining characters, I take it that it is unlikely there are plans to support
these in this release. The biggest holes in the list seem to be languages
which use Arabic, Hebrew, all the Indic scripts and all SE Asian scripts.
So, I think this can be read as "there will be support for Unicode but there
will be no support for complex-script layout" - Chris
No mention either of Azerbaijani (Latin or Cyrillic), Kazakh, or any minority languages of the CIS; nor of anything African. This suggests to me that support of Latin and Cyrillic (probably of Greek too) is restricted to the characters in predefined character sets.
Perhaps I should explain a bit in case some people find me needlessly negative. As I understand it, the existing Mac Word uses Unicode internally, and for its storage format which is compatible with that of Word for Windows. But there are two major limitations. The first is with keyboarding. The second is that the only Unicode characters which can be displayed (even in documents prepared on Windows and opened on the Mac) are those included in certain pre-defined character sets, because the rendering engine maps characters into those sets for rendering.
It seems to me, from what I have seen promised for Office 2004, that Microsoft is making major improvements in the former area, which may allow any Unicode character to be entered, and these changes are very welcome. But there is no sign or suggestion of major changes to the rendering engine. All I see suggested is some minor changes around the edges, perhaps to squeeze a few extra characters into the existing charater sets, perhaps to include a few extra character sets. But unless the restriction to predefined and mostly small character sets has been lifted (and there is no sign that it has), the only characters which can be rendered are those in a rather limited subset, not even including all precomposed Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, and certainly not including PUA. All other characters, if entered, will be displayed as boxes, or question marks or something. As I said before, I hope I'm wrong, but I won't expect major changes to the rendering engine unless there is some indication from Microsoft that it is on the way.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
