Well, the standard thing to do is to degrade gracefully. You app should
run as well as it can on Win98,and run better on Win2k or WinXP. If you
encounter some UTF-16 supplementary characters, handle it with an error
message or something else, such as showing a glyph for "undisplayable
character". It's what we do. You can only force it so far.
So, the error is really "We were not able to display the Linear B text
since you are on Win98", and don't display it until you have to. That
way you can pretty much be sure no one will see the error. :-)
Cheers,
Chris
Sent with OfficeXP on WindowsXP
-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Kochanski [mailto:unicode@cardbox.net]
Sent: March 14, 2002 00:47
To: Chris Pratley; unicode@unicode.org
Subject: RE: Keyboard Layouts for Office XP in Windows 98
At 21:47 13/03/02 -0800, Chris Pratley wrote:
>If you're trying to offer users something not supported on old systems,
>you are going to have to get users to understand versions - there's no
>way around it - via manual, error message, whatever.
Yes, but the crucial thing is that when the "something" is as
unimportant to most ordinary people as Unicode support, then we can't
deprive them of our product *as a whole* simply because they don't want
to go through an expensive upheaval. "Sorry, you can't use Cardbox on
your Windows installation without upgrading Windows, because it wouldn't
be able to handle Linear B properly" is not a terribly useful thing to
say to a monoglot English-speaker.
>If there is another
>solution that does handle what you are trying to do for them, then they
>are right to go buy that. It just so happens that that other solution
>might be called "latest version of Windows". :-)
Strictly speaking, I don't actually know *what* I am trying to do for
them. I may be trying to give them {insert glowing description of
software here}, in which case they don't need to buy anything from you.
Or I may be trying to give them {insert glowing description of software
here} with support for complex Unicode scripts and supplementary plane
characters, in which case it is indeed reasonable to tell them to buy
the latest Windows (or just install the latest Office or IE, if it's
only the scripts).
Which is all to say that one day the DLLs you mention *will* be "part of
Windows" (in about 2005, I reckon), because one day Windows XP will be
the oldest version of Windows that one can reasonably expect anyone to
have. Until then, we'll need to do the best we can -- which is directly
linking to anything that Win98 provides "out of the box" and dynamically
linking to the rest, so that if the facility is there then we can use
it. This, although a little tedious to program, makes a nice invisible
solution: the majority will work quite happily whether or not they have
the latest software from MS, and they will automatically get all the
Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts anyway. Anyone needing something more
advanced than that will be *aware* that they have an advanced
requirement and may well have upgraded to cope with it already.
Thanks for the hint about the registry key. Anyone know any free font
that has some SMP characters in it? It really doesn't matter what they
are, because if our program works with one SMP character, it'll work
with them all.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Mar 15 2002 - 00:43:23 EST