--- Forwarded Message from "Richard Kunst" <[log in to unmask]> ---

>Date: Thu, 6 May 2004 07:57:49 -0400
>From: "Richard Kunst" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: Language Learning and Technology International Information Forum
<[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: RE: #7509 (new number!) mWord v.X not Unicode-capable

On Wed, May 5, 2004, John de Szendeffy <[log in to unmask]> wrote

> I wrote last week that Office v.X is not Unicode compliant. The NEXT
> version is purported to be, Office X 2004, available May 12,
> although I
> can find no specific information to that effect on the MS site, not
> surprisingly.

Dear LLTIers,

Back in January there was quite a bit of discussion on the Unicode
list regarding the degree of Unicode support in Office 2004 for the
Mac. I think the gist of it was that it is at last fairly comparable
to that of Office 2003 for Windows, although there was some
uncertainty then about the right-to-left support and other rendering
of complex scripts. For detailed info, including the explanations of
the Apple and MS Office for Mac developers themselves, you can go to
the Unicode list archives at http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/ and
search for "Office 2004". Note that you need to type in the
userid "unicode-ml" and password "unicode", as given on that page.

Office X uses Unicode (UCS-2 only) internally, but is a prisoner to
the Mac encodings which it translates to and from on input and output.
As Han-Yi Shaw, Microsoft program manager for Word for the Mac, wrote:

"By "Unicode-throughout", we mean that MacOffice 2004 supports Unicode-
input, storage, and rendering.  In the past (e.g., MacOffice X), our
apps only accepted characters in older encoding schemes, which then
get converted to their equivalent 16-bit form (in Unicode encoding)
for storage, after which are once again "downgraded" to MacRoman or
MacJapanese before sending them to QuickDraw routines for rendering."

Best,
Rick Kunst

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AHRB Wa Dictionary Project
Dept of South East Asia (Rm 461)
School of Oriental and African Studies, U of London
Thornhaugh St, Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG UK
Tel +44 (0)20 7898 4298
Fax +44 (0)20 7898 4319
http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/wadict
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