RE: Unicode and Word

From: Janko Stamenovic (janko@teletrader.com)
Date: Wed Jan 05 2000 - 04:47:36 EST


> -----Original Message-----
> From: peter_constable@sil.org [mailto:peter_constable@sil.org]
>
> Thanks for the clarification. So, I gather you specify the
> language by setting the locale ID, yes?

It's not so easy. For us mortals, languages are hardcoded in Windows 95/98,
as well as relation betweeen language and code page. That's because some of
these information is in .NLS files, format of which was never published by
Microsoft. The only known thing is: they "upgrade" them sometimes even with
a new Internet Explorer, and they are different on Windows 95/98 and NT.

So you are stuck with the languages Microsoft gave you. The relation
language-codepage is fixed.

What you can alter: you can select which keyboard will match the language
you want.

So for example using my KBD generator I can write English, German (your and
my default CP), Cyrillic (from Russian keyboard page), Hungarian (from
central european code page) and Greek, all in the same Word document. You'd
be able to do it even without my software, the trick is that you'd probably
hate to do so because you'd have only one hardware keyboard in front of you,
and default KBD files are made only for people who have, let's say, Russian
keyboard, or Hungarian, or Greek.

The program gives you the chance to type A on all languages and get A for
appropriate language. Using built-in KBD files you'd most often get some
other character.

Or even better example: try to type French using French keyboard -- they
have AZERTY instead of QWERTY. Or German using German keyboard -- their
layout is QWERTZ. With my software you still completelly depend on the
system -- you merely replaced the letters associated with keys.

Exactly the same behavior as Mac users were able to do with ResEdit.

Practically, ResEdit is just an environment for integration of smaller
programs for editing of resources. One resource is keyboard there (on Macs
OSes), just like KBD files in Windows. And on Mac OSes, the equivalent of my
Keyboard Generator is simply integrated in ResEdit. Of course, I used
ResEdit before I decided that I need the same thing on Windows. Bad
composers plagirize, good composers steal ideas. :)

Back to Language ID -- as far as I know (for languages I used) Microsoft
still does not use this field, whatever you put, everything will work. But
it exists in specification so I added this just in case, before Win98
appeared, because I was not sure if they will change this in last minutes.

Janko Stamenovic



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