From: John Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Thu Dec 04 2003 - 13:49:05 EST
On Dec 4, 2003, at 11:12 AM, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 17:41 +0000 2003-12-04, Raymond Mercier wrote:
>> Well can we be perfectly clear about this: I read that OS X is
>> Unicode compliant, yet I understand you to say that Word (as part of
>> Office) on OS X is not. If that is true of Word on OS X then I am
>> surprised - even amazed, but that seems to be what you said. Is it
>> really the case that characters in Word in OS X are not stored as
>> Unicode, even though they are so stored in Word in Windows NT (and
>> later) on a PC ? If not stored as Unicode on a Mac, then how are they
>> stored ?
>
> Apparently Mac Roman. I don't know. Ask Microsoft.
>
Office uses Unicode internally, and Mac Office files are
binary-compatible with Windows Office files.
For *drawing* and *input*, Office on the Mac is limited to that portion
of Unicode which doesn't require complex or bidi layout, and which is
covered by one of the old Mac scripts. This pretty much means Latin,
Cyrillic, and East Asia, although their coverage of East Asia is pretty
spotty.
The Office people are perfectly aware that this isn't an ideal
solution. Whether or not they're working on it, I cannot say. Their
problem is that over the last couple of years, they've had two major
transitions to make: one to use Carbon (so that they can run on X), and
one to use Apple's Unicode-drawing engine (or some derivative of it).
They've done the former, and no doubt at some point will attempt the
latter.
This is true for most producers of existing programs, BTW. The oldest
date back to several years before Unicode and so have had to undertake
three major rewrites: one to use Unicode for text storage and
processing, one to use Carbon to run on X, and one to use the new
Unicode-drawing APIs. That's a lot of work. And there's been a
certain hesitance, too, because the earlier versions of Unicode-drawing
on the Mac were slow, although that's improved substantially in 10.3.
It's no coincidence that the bulk of applications which support Unicode
on the Mac are new ones. They don't have to rewrite anything.
It's also no coincidence that the applications which have their own
internal text-rendering engines (e.g., Office and Adobe's applications)
have lagged in getting Unicode display.
========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jhjenkins@mac.com
http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/
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