Subject: Word97 and Unicode

From: Christian Wittern <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Apr 1997 08:38:50 +0000

Dear Colleagues,

You might be aware of this, but it is completely new to me.

I recently had a look at Word 97. I played with (late beta Versions)
of the English and Chinese programs on English, Japanese and Chinese
Windows  95 as well as German Win NT 4.0.

The internal file format of Word 97 is now in Unicode. There seems to
be no difference in Fileformats between Western and East-Asian
versions. Now, finally it is not longer necessary to keep copies of
the program in two, three or four different languages and operating
systems, just to accomodate the need of processing multiple Asian
languages. It is now possible to create a file, say, on Japanese
Windows in English Word97  and open it in Chinese Windows and Chinese
Word 97 and the Characters will display correctly without the need of
any conversion! (Since the standard font names are different, there
might be a need to set up the font mapping for the Japanese to the
Chinese fonts - this is done once and forever).

Although the file format is Unicode, the CJK glyphs are still seen
through the limitations of the national encodings. This means that
Word 97 running on Chinese Windows will only display Characters from
Big5, Japanese Word only those from JIS; Characters outside of these
ranges are displayed as a 'missing glyph' question mark, but are not
in any way distorted, deleted or mixed up. This is still true even if
the font used contains all the 20000+ CJK glyphs from the Unicode
standard, like for example Bitstreams Cyberbit (free download from
http://www.bitstream.com). This situation only changes when Word 97 is
running on NT: With the proper font installed, it will happily display
all CJK glyphs thus finally, after *years* of pain, making it possible
to mix Asian and European text, with Sanskrit and whatever in one
document.  To some extend, this is even possible in English WIndows
95, where it is possible to install the fonts from the Internet
Explorer Language Pack (www.microsoft.com and all over the planet,
search for ie3lpktw.exe, ie3lpkcn.exe and so forth).

Even the English version of Word97, running in a CJK environment, now
is smart enough to register a switch of the Keyboard from alphabetical
to ideographic input and will adjust the font accordingly.

It seems the day finally has come where we can switch our
textprocessing to Unicode and forget about things like Big5, JIS, KSC
and the like to concentrate on the work we originally planned to do
with the help of a computer.

The next major problem seems to be a convenient input method, but with
Visual Basic lurking in the background, I think I can come up with
some provisional hack to solve this.

All the best,

Christian Wittern              Visit the Database of Chinese Buddhist texts
University of Goettingen       at http://www.gwdg.de/~cwitter