On Wednesday, March 6, 2002, at 09:15 AM, John Wilcock wrote:
> On Wed, 6 Mar 2002 07:57:08 -0700, John H. Jenkins wrote: >> MS Office X converts Unicode text to >> runs of older Mac script systems and does not use ATSUI. It is therefore >> limited in the extent to which it supports Unicode. > > Is there a good reason why a program which only runs on OS X would > need to convert to these older script systems? Or is this just a > hangover from earlier versions of Office for Mac? > Mostly the latter. There are two ways to get an app to run on X, to Carbonize it and to rewrite it in Cocoa. The former is much easier, particularly for large apps, but it just means that it has many of the limitations that it used to have. Typically, when an application is Carbonized, it will run on both 9 and X, but Microsoft for some reason to which I am not privy chose not to do that. Apple has had the capacity for direct Unicode drawing for some time. Microsoft Office has not chosen to take advantage of this in the past for various reasons. In the past little while, their main focus has been on getting Office to run natively on X at all. Rewriting it to also do direct Unicode drawing was a lower priority for them. I've heard rumors that this will change in the next release. MS is not the only one to do this, BTW. You have to do extensive rewriting to support Unicode directly, and somewhat less rewriting to support X directly. A lot of developers are opting to do the latter first and keep their revenue streams up, with the former coming afterwards. ========== John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
