At 2:19 pm -0800 14/1/04, John Hudson wrote:
Han-Yi provided a list of *keyboards* and indicated that Mac Office will support 'input, display and basic editing of Unicode characters associated with' those keyboards. I think your question, Peter, is what will Mac Office do with characters not associated with those keyboards? Obviously they won't claim any support for *input* but what about display and editing?
What is input by a certain keyboard layout is entirely at the discretion of the designer of the layout. If I want to type small Greek Alpha with perispomeni, I can use the hex input to type either:
a) option + 1fb6
a) option + 03b10342
The resultant character will be identical.
The keyboard layout I use for polytonic Greek uses only pre-composed characters because that's the way I've written it. It would be quite simple to have it type either or both with the same keystroke or any keystroke.
If I want to type Lao, I get a keyboard layout to do so. Once I have it, I can type Lao in any editor that supports Unicode. That's all there is to it.
The keyboards are nothing to do with Microsoft surely? If they feel like bundling certain keyboards with Office, well and good. That won't mean you have to use them and it won't mean you can't use your own layouts or layouts downloaded from sites that do layouts. I really don't see what the problem is.
If parts of the new MS suite have difficulty rendering any particular sort of text, then that would be hardly surprising for applications that haven't even been released yet and any rough edges, if they exist, would be tidied up in due course.
I can understand the great scepticism expressed in some postings here, having used Nisus since 1990 or so and never used Word because it wasn't capable even of dealing with legacy two-byte scripts. I will almost certainly continue to use Nisus, but at least now I shall have a choice.
JD
