RE: Should I laugh or cry?

From: Frank da Cruz (fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 17 1996 - 17:43:11 EST


> This isn't a place for advertising, but since this email literally cries
> out for a response, please note that Microsoft Office 97 (available in
> January, 1997) is based on Unicode. In particular, Microsoft Word 97
> easily handles mixtures of all East and West European languages: French,
> German, Greek, Russian, etc. Enjoy.
>
> Any other vendors that have panEuropean Unicode support, please feel
> free to brag about it!
>
OK... The terminal emulator in Kermit 95 communications software -- the
Windows NT version only, for now (Windows 95 comes later) -- is based on
Unicode. To my knowledge (but I'm sure somebody on this list will tell me
otherwise) it is the first terminal emulator to fully implement ISO 2022
character-set designation and invocation AND be able to display any mixture of
French, German, Icelandic, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew,
Sami, Russian, Katakana, etc, together at the same time on the terminal
screen. It supports all 10 Latin alphabets on the remote end, plus a large
repertoire of private character sets (IBM, DEC, DG, NeXT, HP, etc).

For now the display is limited to whatever happens to be in Lucida Console
(so, e.g. no Hebrew, Arabic, or Katakana, at least not in the USA version of
NT), but later we'll probably make our own font, since good emulation of a
wide variety of terminals also requires some characters that are not, and
probably never will be, in Unicode (the response to the query I posted here
earlier on the subject was not exactly overwhelming). And we'll add more
language groups (CJK, Vietnamese, Georgian, Armenian, etc).

Frank da Cruz
The Kermit Project
Columbia University
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/



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