Scripsit Peter:

> This tentative list doesn't look to be very much of an improvement on the current 
> situation.

I must respectfully disagree.  Previous versions of Mac Word have NOT been 
Unicode-based.  This means that Mac users could not take advantage of the many 
existing Unicode TrueType fonts; in my own case, I have a number of characters in the 
PUA that are important to me.  If MS has rewritten the basic code so that this and 
future versions can use Unicode, that is a great step forward.

For languages such as polytonic Greek (I assume "Greek" in the list refers to modern 
Greek) and Cyrillic, it's only a matter of adding a keyboard; some of these already 
exist, such as GreeKeys for the Mac, and the XML specification to make them is 
publicly available.

I do understand that it's disappointing when a new release comes out without features 
that one is particularly interested in (having been in that position myself).  Keeping 
in mind that support for Arabic and Indic languages would add a great deal of 
complexity to the project (particularly since Mac OS X does not support OpenType), I 
am delighted to see a Unicode-native version of Office come out at long last; it lays 
the foundation for future developments.

David 


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