On 12 Oct 2007 at 9:42, Randolph Peters wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > > >Does Sibelius already do Unicode and handle double-byte character > >sets transparently? > > I don't know first hand how well Sibelius handles Unicode. Their web > site says yes, but Michael Good says no. Perhaps someone can clarify > this question with regards to Sibelius 5. > > But I guess your larger point is that Unicode translation and > handling double-byte character > sets transparently is the first requirement if Finale is to make any > inroads into Asian markets. > > How big a technical hurdle is this for Finale?
As an outsider, I don't know. but the first thing that would have to change would be the database engine underlying Finale's file format. That's not trivial at all. Microsoft upgraded the Jet database engine that is used in Microsoft Access in version 4, which was released at the same time as Access 2000. Unicode support is there in the data store, and can actually be turned off to save space. The feature is called "Unicode compression" and what it does is revert to the old method of single-byte storage for each character, which allows you to store more data before you bump up against the hard file-size limitation (2GBs, formerly 1GB in Jet 3.x and before). But Microsoft has resources that MM lacks (though it was also a crucial product, as a Jet data store is used for Active Directory, a central component of the Windows server versions). However, I have it from some inside sources that MS had lost some of the original source code and documentation for the Jet database engine, and nobody left there entirely understood how it worked when they embarked on the Jet 4 upgrades. This has changed drastically since the late 90s, as the Jet engine is now forked into two different versions, the legacy version based on Jet 4 (maintained by the Windows development team, and probably scheduled for obsolescence as soon as Windows ships with its long-planned WinFS, which uses a built-in version of SQL Server to run the file system) and the new ACE, released with Access 2007, It's really Jet version 5, but since it's being developed by the Access team and is entirely under their control, the name is being tied to Access itself. The new file format uses the ACCDB file extension (instead of the traditional MDB), but the database engine that ships with Access 2007 is fully backwardly compatible with all Jet versions through 3.0. I digress, of course, but the point is that databases are complex, and that would be the first thing that MM would have to do. Then they'd have to visit basically every line of code sitting on top of the database engine interface, which I guess would likely be just about everything. So, it's really no trivial task, and it wouldn't at all surprise me if some of the meagerness of recent released Finale versions were due to the fact that significant resources are being expended on a long- term rewrite of the entire codebase to enable Unicode in some future version. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
