--- 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 _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ 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 _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/