Word 2008 - does it do right-to-left text

[JE McGimpsey]

At some point there comes a stage when patching old crud becomes untenable
and it is time to do a complete (or major) re-write. This is because the
quality goes down, and costs of even small changes goes up. Because
Microsoft continue to refuse to do a major rewrite we are as I said stuck
with DECADES old bugs.

If a business has truly reached the stage at which "patching old (code)"
is untenable, then one has a choice: (a) do a major/complete rewrite, as
you suggest, and (b) shut down development.

The key term above is "business". Unless or until the Mac market can
*profitably* support the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost
to do that, the only rational choice is (b).

Since MS hasn't chosen to do that, one can only assume that they've
decided that the situation is NOT untenable, yet. Therefore, "refusing"
to do a major rewrite benefits both MS and Mac users who wish to
continue to use MacOffice.

Develop a consortium that will commit to buy 100 million MacOffice
licenses, and I suspect that MacBU would be willing to consider that
rewrite. The only problem I foresee is that, having had major problems
finding qualified and experienced Mac developers recently just to
complete their "patching", I can't imagine how they'd exponentially ramp
up to a professional development team that could complete that major
rewrite by, say, 2012.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi John:

Puh-Leeeze don't let's get into a round of "I can't get such and
such a character" only to discover that you don't own a font that contains
it

A firm of [Mac using] lawyers specialising in immigration issues frequently
receives PC Word files containing Cyrillic text. Nearly always Word 2004
(for Mac) fails to display this properly whereas TextEdit has no problems
with the same document. I have also seen this message from a Welsh user
"Office on Mac simply doesn't support Unicode at all, as far as I can see.
Whilst that obviously affects R-L scripts, it also means Mac Office is
useless for many European and other roman-script languages. In my case
that's Welsh -- where 'W' and 'Y' are vowels, which often need to be
accented."

I did ASK you not to cite examples where the problem was simply that the
user did not have a font that contains the required characters. Those are
both instances of precisely that.

The document is encoded on the PC in a font that is available on the Mac,
but the Mac version of the font doesn't contain the required characters.
Older Mac fonts typically have around 260-280 different characters. Some of
the newer ones have 512. A mainstream PC font typically has around 1,500
characters. Arial Unicode MS has 32,760.

Since you have access to a PC, find and copy Arial Unicode MS .ttf into your
Mac user fonts folder. You will never see the missing characters problem
again. And tell your Welsh and Lawyer mates to do the same

Microsoft understood this lesson for Windows (Vista is a major rewrite
whereas previous versions merely patched old crud), they should therefore
adopt it for Office as well.

Microsoft would like us to believe that Vista is a major rewrite. The truth
is rather more prosaic: Vista is Microsoft Windows NT 6.0. They only
changed the stuff they needed to. And they added a whole heap of things
that make the product much more desirable for some user segments.

But a re-write, it ain't

Adobe, produce far more Mac software than Microsoft, with a smaller Mac team
and their Mac software is of far higher quality than the ghastly stuff from
Microsoft. Adobe has exactly the same business and technical issues to
consider as Microsoft so it can be done.

They do? You have an example? Last I heard, Photoshop still wasn't
multi-threaded, still wasn't 64-bit, and still runs like treacle in winter
on OS X? Oh, and Adobe also managed to faithfully replicate the "Long time
to market" methodology for PhotoShop, if you recall -- it was a few YEARS
before we got PhotoShop for Mac OS X. And that was one of their most
mission-critical applications, on the Mac.

Microsoft, I believe, popped Microsoft Office X in the box on the first OS X
Macs to ship, didn't it? Sorta saved Apple by doing that, some would say?

Even produced a new Made-Only-For-Mac Browser, as I recall. One that set a
new high for "standards compliance" when it came out (which rather surprised
us all, given its source...)

By all means, let's have a debate. But let's be sure we're looking at the
whole picture

The new file format will be available to users of Office 2004 as well FREE
OF CHARGE so users are NOT forced to move to Office 2008 for this (and pay
vast sums of money).

That's true. However, I suspect that Microsoft Office 2004 will not be able
to edit some of the constructs that Office 2007 can generate. Basically,
Office 2007 has a whole new graphics subsystem based on SVG. These will
display in the earlier versions of applications, but I very much doubt that
they will be able to edit them.

Office unlike Photoshop is not as speed sensitive an application. Yes more
speed is always nice but in the case of Office it is not as critical.

I specialise in documents larger than 2,000 pages. I have a different view

Examples - due to the way Word handles autosaving recovery files and not
closing previous ones properly you can end up with 'too many files open'.

A bug acknowledged by Apple, I believe. Something about their operating
system not responding to the file transport layer request to close the file?

Another even more annoying one is that Word AND Excel when storing files on
a Mac OS X 10.4 server do not (from a Mac point of view) do file locking
properly resulting in all sorts of problems, e.g. Saying a file is busy when
it is not, and vice versa (there is some case for saying this might be
Apple's fault but only Word/Excel show the problem, we do not have these
problems with other software e.g. Adobe).

Another one acknowledged as a bug by Apple, I thought? Something about
advertised functions in their file transport not working as they were
documented at the time Office 2004 was developed?

If I publish the specifications for an operating system, then you write an
application for that operating system, then I change my mind about how I
make it work, what would you do? I might find it amusing that your software
looks like it's broken, and the users think it's YOUR fault. But you might
not be very amused, and you might question whether you wanted to invest much
more money developing software for my operating system.

OS X is a very young operating system. Everyone expected some pain in the
early days, and we got it. Hopefully there will be less of that sort of
thing going on in OS 10.5.

Cheers

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi John,

I've wondered about this. Apple could have made the leap to Intel and
ditched the PowerPC processor at the same time as OSX saving developers
countless hours of porting twice (once to OSX and then again to Intel).

Even though it might have made the most sense from a programmer/developer
point of view, do you think the market would have supported a switch like
that after the huge marketing effort for the PPC? The risk would have been
*very* high, I think.

The decisions that were made by Apple and Microsoft were not easy to make.
Microsoft's Mac Business Unit has tried to go along with every major
decision made by Apple. When going to OSX Microsoft was the first major
company with a product ready to sell (Office v.x). At the time MacBU started
off trying to make Office X for both OS9 and OSX, but realized they couldn't
do both. For the port to Intel, MacBU could have stuck with Rosetta but
chose to go along with making Office a dual binary. If it were my decision
it might have been to make Office 2008 Intel only and forget about the PPC
altogether. But it was not my decision to make.

The transition to Intel is hard for MacBU to cope with. 8-but, 16-bit and
32-but code is going away. A modern foundation to last for decades is being
built with an eye toward eventually a 64-bit Intel hardware environment.

Maybe if Apple had gone directly to Intel and ditched the PPC when going to
OSX things would be different now. Looking back I don't think Apple could
have done it at the time, but I'd certainly accept an argument that perhaps
that would have been a better approach. Just the same, that approach was not
taken, so things are they way they are now.

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

Looking at Mac history, if Microsoft had bitten the bullet back when OS X
was launched (i.e. we are talking about Office v.X) and done a more
substantial rewrite to proper OS X goodness (instead of a bare minimum
approach), they would not have had as much pain now AND IT WOULD NOT HAVE
COST AS MUCH TO PORT TO OS X ON INTEL.

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Phillip,

Personally, I strongly disagree. I think Office 2004 is the best version of
Office ever released by anyone on any platform, including Office 2003 and
Office 2007 on Windows and every version of openoffice and every version of
WordPerfect. It's first rate in most respects. It is not perfect, however.
No major application is perfect.

Leopard is in many years advanced over Windows Vista IMHO. Next year at
MacWorld I expect to see eye-popping features added to almost every Mac
application that will make other platform users drool and proclaim that all
these wonderful features are "bloat" and "unnecessary" - at least until they
eventually make it onto their platform of choice.

I think the gap is closing concerning features not found on the Mac. The
areas I still seem some catching up to do are Right-to-left language
support, some network stuff (although Thursby software fills this gap), and
some database applications (we still don't have MS Access but at least we
can now use SQL to query Access tables). I suspect these gaps will disappear
from efforts by Apple and Microsoft or from other 3rd party providers.

Just look at how VM Ware and Parallels came onto the scene to offer
virtualization superior to anything you'll find in LINUX or Windows. I
expect to see a lot of exciting new stuff in the near future - especially in
the first 2 years after Leopard is introduced.

-Jim Gordon

That's the problem we the Mac Community will always have to put up with
second third rate software. What choice do we have everyone says we have
choices. Yes on PC PC's have probably 10 to 20 different Major Word pros

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[John Lockwood]

Oh, come on now - be sensible.

Microsoft has had a team of THOUSANDS of people working on Vista - and it's
taken them how many years to develop it?

There are MILLIONS of man-hours invested in Vista - about 90 million,
according to Business Week. Estimated total development cost is around $10
BILLION.

They can justify that because they expect to spread that development cost
over hundreds of millions of units (current PC sales worldwide are around
200 million units per annum), so the development cost _per license_ comes to
something under $100.

Now, how can you equate that sort of exercise with Office for Mac? Just how
many licenses of 'Office 2013' (it took 5 years to re-write windows) would
you have to sell to recover your money?

If it was your business, would you spend that money?

I think it would be quite realistic to assume sales of Office 2008 _COULD_
be in the millions (but obviously not hundreds of millions). While the
numbers needing right-to-left is obviously going to be far lower the cost
would actually be spread across ALL sales of Office 2008 (not just those
using right-to-left). So I still think cost is a load of bull.

Apple have just released their latest sales figures (see
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/01/17results.html ) which show sales of
1.6 MILLION Macs in the last quarter which is an increase of 28% over last
years period. Lets for arguments sake round this to just 4 million Macs a
year (a million a quarter) and IGNORE any potential Office upgrades, and
lets further assume 50% of new Macs would also have Office purchased for
them, this would equate to 2 MILLION copies a year, and in reality, there
would be upgrades, and Mac sales would continue to increase. This EASILY
would justify this development cost if Microsoft were not purely focused on
squeezing every last penny out it and delivering the crappiest anti-mac
software they can get away with. After all Microsoft have also previously
stated they make far more profit on Office Mac than Office Windows.

Microsoft obviously make so much money on Office Mac that even their
blatantly anti-Mac attitude which would otherwise have led to Office being
discontinued by now is off set by all the loot they can gouge from Mac
users.

Once again I also refer to the fact that Microsoft STILL keep boasting they
have the biggest Mac development team outside Apple. They should put up or
shut up.

 

[Barry Wainwright [MVP]]

I think it would be quite realistic to assume sales of Office 2008 _COULD_
be in the millions (but obviously not hundreds of millions).
Agreed

While the
numbers needing right-to-left is obviously going to be far lower
True

the cost
would actually be spread across ALL sales of Office 2008 (not just those
using right-to-left). So I still think cost is a load of bull.

Bunkum,

The number they need to consider is how many _extra_ copies will they sell
by putting RTL support in. If they think they will already sell 5 million
copies, and adding RTL support will allow them to sell 5 million and ten
copies, then the cost of adding RTL has to be paid for by the profit in
those ten copies - not the 5m they will already be selling!

Bear in mind that adding cost almost always results in losing sales, so they
need to put that balance in there as well.

 

[Phillip Jones]

Where can I donate 10 bucks to the cause?!

If a business has truly reached the stage at which "patching old (code)"
is untenable, then one has a choice: (a) do a major/complete rewrite, as
you suggest, and (b) shut down development.

The key term above is "business". Unless or until the Mac market can
*profitably* support the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost
to do that, the only rational choice is (b).

Since MS hasn't chosen to do that, one can only assume that they've
decided that the situation is NOT untenable, yet. Therefore, "refusing"
to do a major rewrite benefits both MS and Mac users who wish to
continue to use MacOffice.

Develop a consortium that will commit to buy 100 million MacOffice
licenses, and I suspect that MacBU would be willing to consider that
rewrite. The only problem I foresee is that, having had major problems
finding qualified and experienced Mac developers recently just to
complete their "patching", I can't imagine how they'd exponentially ramp
up to a professional development team that could complete that major
rewrite by, say, 2012.

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Martinsville Va 24112 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
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[Phillip Jones]

Hi Phillip,

Personally, I strongly disagree. I think Office 2004 is the best version of
Office ever released by anyone on any platform, including Office 2003 and
Office 2007 on Windows and every version of openoffice and every version of
WordPerfect. It's first rate in most respects. It is not perfect, however.
No major application is perfect.

Leopard is in many years advanced over Windows Vista IMHO. Next year at
MacWorld I expect to see eye-popping features added to almost every Mac
application that will make other platform users drool and proclaim that all
these wonderful features are "bloat" and "unnecessary" - at least until they
eventually make it onto their platform of choice.

I think the gap is closing concerning features not found on the Mac. The
areas I still seem some catching up to do are Right-to-left language
support, some network stuff (although Thursby software fills this gap), and
some database applications (we still don't have MS Access but at least we
can now use SQL to query Access tables). I suspect these gaps will disappear
from efforts by Apple and Microsoft or from other 3rd party providers.

Just look at how VM Ware and Parallels came onto the scene to offer
virtualization superior to anything you'll find in LINUX or Windows. I
expect to see a lot of exciting new stuff in the near future - especially in
the first 2 years after Leopard is introduced.

-Jim Gordon

I hope so.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |LIFE MEMBER: VPEA ETA-I, NESDA, ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
------------------------------------------------------------------------

If it's "fixed", don't "break it"!

mailto[email protected]

<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/default.htm>
<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/90th_Birthday/index.htm>
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<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/Jones/default.htm>

<http://www.vpea.org>

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

At your local Mac shop: Go buy a copy of something

Where can I donate 10 bucks to the cause?!

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi John:

You left your <troll> </troll> tags off, so everyone thought you were being
sensible

lets further assume 50% of new Macs would also have Office purchased for
them, this would equate to 2 MILLION copies a year, and in reality, there
would be upgrades, and Mac sales would continue to increase. This EASILY
would justify this development cost

Riiight... Lessee now... Five or ten BILLION dollars worth of development
cost amortised over two million units... Oh, that's only going to raise the
price by $2,500 a copy. And it *will* get at least another 100,000
potential sales. Less the ones they lose because Microsoft Office would
then cost $2,899.00 per seat. Yep, that's a really compelling business case
-- NOT! BTW: Your figures are a little high: I believe about ten per cent
of Macs get paid-for licensed copies of Mac Office.

if Microsoft were not purely focused on
squeezing every last penny out it

Then they wouldn't BE here. At all. Like many of their predecessors:
companies who didn't last in the cruel, hard world of shrink-wrap software.

and delivering the crappiest anti-mac
software they can get away with.

Oh, well then, that's simple. Let's just cancel Office 2008. Anyone who
wants Office on the Mac can just drop it into Boot-Camp.

After all Microsoft have also previously
stated they make far more profit on Office Mac than Office Windows.

Yes. Did they state how *much* profit that was? The actual figure is a
closely-guarded secret, of course, and I don't know it. But rumour has it
that they make around a hundred bucks a copy off retail sales, and between
ten and fifty bucks a copy from the majority of their market, which is
corporate sales.

So we're coming off a pretty low base here. I think Microsoft would be
delighted if they actually managed to average 60 bucks per box from Mac
Office. Oh: wait a minute... You thought Microsoft meant that they make
more profit from selling 200,000 units of Mac Office than they make from
selling 300,000,000 units of Microsoft Office for the PC each year? No:
That's NOT what they meant!

These numbers do not justify a "large" investment, John. Not from sane
boards of directors, anyway...

Microsoft obviously make so much money on Office Mac that even their
blatantly anti-Mac attitude which would otherwise have led to Office being
discontinued by now is off set by all the loot they can gouge from Mac
users.

Which anti-Mac attitude is this, John? Do you happen to have any *evidence*
for it? The "facts" seem to record that Microsoft actually helped bail
Apple out. TWICE...

Microsoft is a SOFTWARE company, John. It doesn't give a toss what platform
you run your software on, it's interested only in persuading you to buy
Microsoft software for it. If Microsoft WAS "anti-Mac" they would flip a
bit on the compiler and release Vista unable-to-run on the Mac. And believe
me, flipping a bit is all it would take

Once again I also refer to the fact that Microsoft STILL keep boasting they
have the biggest Mac development team outside Apple. They should put up or
shut up.

Put up WHAT, John? You want to go to Redmond and count the chairs at Mac
BU? Don't forget to count the ones in Silicon Valley too! How many
developers do you imagine it takes to have the "*second* largest" team of
Apple developers in the world? 50? 100?

John, I think it's time you thought a little about the image of yourself
that you're presenting here. OK, you don't like Microsoft. Your choice.
I'm not that fond of HP. But seriously John, they're "Software Companies".
They exist to make software at a profit. The SEC would march them off to
jail if they were to do what you want them to do. Any fool with a compiler
can make "software", John. Making a "profit" is a lot harder.

Cheers

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Peter Jamieson]

A firm of [Mac using] lawyers specialising in immigration issues

frequently
receives PC Word files containing Cyrillic text.

So they're not necessarily talking about Unicode, then. If they are using a
non-Unicode encoding I don't think Word will necessarily recognise it.
Perhaps the Word designers recognised that Mac's TextEdit could already do
all that stuff and that all a user really need do is open in TextEdit then
Copy/paste into Word (it's what I'd try).

have also seen this message from a Welsh user
"Office on Mac simply doesn't support Unicode at all, as far as I can see.
Whilst that obviously affects R-L scripts, it also means Mac Office is
useless for many European and other roman-script languages. In my case
that's Welsh -- where 'W' and 'Y' are vowels, which often need to be
accented."

Word 2004 on Mac OSX appears to support all the /characters/ - natively the
only special characters are "long vowel" accents over aeiouwy, they are all
in Unicode Latin-1 Supplement (aeiou) or Latin Extended-A (wy). I seem to be
able to insert them all here. I can imagine that there is no special
keyboard support or "proofing tools" support for Welsh language users, but
they are certainly not the only language users not to have such support. But
I wouldn't be surprised if Welsh users have other requirements that wouldn't
be obvious to Saesneg users.

receives PC Word files containing Cyrillic text. Nearly always Word 2004
(for Mac) fails to display this properly whereas TextEdit has no problems
with the same document.

Funnily enough I saved my file with the abovementioned Welsh characters
(which also worked fine in the file name as you might hope) as a UTF16 text
file, which opened fine in TextEdit. But when I saved the file in UTF8 from
textEdit and tried to reopen it, neither Word nor TextEdit read it properly.
If I went through the Open File route in TextEdit I could open it by
specifying UTF-8, but what that suggests to me is that TextEdit does not
save UTF8 with a BOM, which I think is a pity because it makes it so much
easier for software to have a really good chance of guessing what format
it's dealing with (and, of course, dealing with little-endian and big-endian
issues).

On the RTL script issue, I find it interesting that many WP packages are
only now catching up with Word on this front. It's a long time since I had a
good look (about 4 years ago in fact) but was actually quite shocked to
discover that the supposedly "Internationally supported" Linux + OpenOffice
combination did not actually support RTL text, and nor could anyone point me
to any reasonably low-cost software on Linux that did. So in other words
even a product that was, I am sure, keen to provide RTL support, /could
not/, presumably either because the support was not built-in to Linux, the
font support was poor. Or maybe it hadn't actually been at the top of their
menu either.

What I would say to any MacBU person who happens to be listening is
a. please fix the Data Merge code that gets data from Mac Excel so it gets
Unicode text and
b. please ensure that it can get data from all the extra columns users will
be allowed in Excel 2008, assuming it's like Excel 2007. (There seems to be
a rather small limit in 2007).

Peter Jamieson

That's not right, and you know it Or, if you like, give me a
specific
example... Puh-Leeeze don't let's get into a round of "I can't get such
and
such a character" only to discover that you don't own a font that
contains
it

A firm of [Mac using] lawyers specialising in immigration issues
frequently
receives PC Word files containing Cyrillic text. Nearly always Word 2004
(for Mac) fails to display this properly whereas TextEdit has no problems
with the same document. I have also seen this message from a Welsh user
"Office on Mac simply doesn't support Unicode at all, as far as I can see.
Whilst that obviously affects R-L scripts, it also means Mac Office is
useless for many European and other roman-script languages. In my case
that's Welsh -- where 'W' and 'Y' are vowels, which often need to be
accented."

At some point there comes a stage when patching old crud becomes untenable
and it is time to do a complete (or major) re-write. This is because the
quality goes down, and costs of even small changes goes up. Because
Microsoft continue to refuse to do a major rewrite we are as I said stuck
with DECADES old bugs.

Doing a major rewrite allows new facilities to be added, bugs to be
eliminated (yes new ones will of course be created), and also COST SAVINGS
on future support and upgrades. Much of this could be shared between the
Windows and Mac platforms. For example apparently VBA for Office for
Windows
64bit is apparently also going to be a problem, a rewrite here could
benefit
both platforms (if for a change Microsoft THINK first).

Looking at Mac history, if Microsoft had bitten the bullet back when OS X
was launched (i.e. we are talking about Office v.X) and done a more
substantial rewrite to proper OS X goodness (instead of a bare minimum
approach), they would not have had as much pain now AND IT WOULD NOT HAVE
COST AS MUCH TO PORT TO OS X ON INTEL. I am not saying Microsoft in that
case were wrong (it allowed them to get v.X out quicker and cheaper), but
some pain earlier would have saved a lot of pain later.

Microsoft understood this lesson for Windows (Vista is a major rewrite
whereas previous versions merely patched old crud), they should therefore
adopt it for Office as well.

Microsoft seem far too fond of the quick and [very] dirty fix.

Adobe, produce far more Mac software than Microsoft, with a smaller Mac
team
and their Mac software is of far higher quality than the ghastly stuff
from
Microsoft. Adobe has exactly the same business and technical issues to
consider as Microsoft so it can be done.

I disagree strongly. It offers a Universal binary and the new file
format.
This is like the change from Word 95 to Word 97 on the PC. It offered
practically NO new "features", but it offered 32-bit processing, the
Word.Document.8 32-bit file format that was far more robust than its
predecessor, and the ability to use rich file systems such as HFS+ and
NTFS.

For the home Mac user, the Universal Binary will be the reason they want
it.
At last they will get some PERFORMANCE out of their Mac-Intels. Wait
'till
you see this thing operating on a laptop. It jumps and sparkles on
challenging documents where the old one plods and grinds.

The new file format will be available to users of Office 2004 as well FREE
OF CHARGE so users are NOT forced to move to Office 2008 for this (and pay
vast sums of money).

Office unlike Photoshop is not as speed sensitive an application. Yes more
speed is always nice but in the case of Office it is not as critical.

2004 still has major problems with Apple servers.

It does? What are they?

Examples - due to the way Word handles autosaving recovery files and not
closing previous ones properly you can end up with 'too many files open'.
Another even more annoying one is that Word AND Excel when storing files
on
a Mac OS X 10.4 server do not (from a Mac point of view) do file locking
properly resulting in all sorts of problems, e.g. Saying a file is busy
when
it is not, and vice versa (there is some case for saying this might be
Apple's fault but only Word/Excel show the problem, we do not have these
problems with other software e.g. Adobe).

 

[Phillip Jones]

The closest Mac Shop I have in my area is probably;y now located at
CompUSA in Va Beach a 5 hour drive from where I live. sigh :-(

At your local Mac shop: Go buy a copy of something

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |LIFE MEMBER: VPEA ETA-I, NESDA, ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
------------------------------------------------------------------------

If it's "fixed", don't "break it"!

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[JE McGimpsey]

The closest Mac Shop I have in my area is probably;y now located at
CompUSA in Va Beach a 5 hour drive from where I live. sigh :-(

You could try

http://www.cpupros.com/

They're only about an hour away from you.

 

[ali]

We have 2 major problems here:
1. Apple's RTL support is not perfect, even on Tiger.

- It has very serious bugs on Kashida, so it's better to ignore its
kashida support at all.("Kashida" implementation make the words to be
"streched", where ever this is possible, instead of increasing the
space between the words(Justification). It is a must have for
Professional Arabic/Persian Word Processing).

- Current system-wide Text Engine cannot properly show Persian/Arabic
texts using OpenType fonts.(letters are sepearted when using opentype
fonts!).

Redlers(Mellel) and Winsoft(Adobe ME Products) are using their own
text engines that support both AAT and OpenType.

I'm sure there will be some good news regarding this issues with
Leopard release, but it is not a complete RTL solution to use Panther/
Tiger's builtin Text-Engine for MS Word 2007/2008. But at least it
will properly show RTL -Right Aligned,Left Aligned & Justified- texts!

2. It seems that Microsoft MacBU won't make its products suitable for
Middle Eastern users until some big sells of its products in Middle
East.
How can we expect Middle Eastern users buy such products that are not
supporting their languages well?
I don't know about MS Office Sales, but even with current RTL related
issues and not having any official Apple Stores in Middle East, Apple
prducts are selling well here.(However there are some unofficial Apple
stores here.)

P.S: Does windows version of MS Office has strong sales in Middle
East? It currently has Arabic/Persian User Interface & Spellchecker!

Best Regards,
Ali Rastegar

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Ali:

I am afraid your post says it all. It would be silly of us to expect RTL
support in Microsoft Word Mac until Apple gets it right in OS X.

We should all remember that: anyone here who knows what is in Office 2008
is not allowed to tell us: so anyone who tells us, by definition, doesn't
know!

Of course, you can run Windows Word 2003/2007 happily in Parallels, and if
you do, you will have RTL support.

The bottom line is that Microsoft Ofice uses the operating system's text
rendering engine. On Windows, that supports right-to-left languages. When
the Mac OS X version also does, RTL support in Office will probably arrive
soon after.

Cheers

--

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs

+61 4 1209 1410, <mailto:[email protected]> mailto:[email protected]

 

[ali]

Hi John,

The bottom line is that Microsoft Ofice uses the operating system's text
rendering engine. On Windows, that supportsright-to-leftlanguages. When
the Mac OS X version also does, RTL support in Office will probably arrive
soon after.

If MS Office 2004 is using Mac OS X's text rendering engine it should
be able to correctly show Arabic,Persian & Hebrew text using AAT
fonts. It should also support RTL Direction. As I said before, RTL
support in Mac OS X is not perfect, but it works for most texts(other
than those using kashida), so at least MS Word could support RTL
languages at the same level of TextEdit and Nisus Writer.
But it seems MS Word is using its own text rendering engine, or it is
using only parts of system text rendering engine, because it does not
support AAT fonts and RTL Direction at all.
Best Regards,
Ali

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Ali:

Sorry, I should have been a little more specific

With any piece of software designed for a graphical user interface, the
"text handling" software makes up as much as 80 per cent of the application.
So if you make a change to the text-handling routines, you have impacts to
almost every module of the application.

To make this an achievable target, the software developers "draw a line" and
freeze their design at a specific point. With text direction, you have to
"design it in" to the software, you can't add it later. That line gets
drawn about two years before the software goes on sale.

So Word 2004 uses the Mac OS X text engine as it existed in late 2002. As
you can imagine, there wasn't much in the way of support for RTL languages
then.

I'm sure you will understand that Microsoft gets one or two complaints on
the average business day: can you imagine what would happen if their RTL
support only "sort of" worked? Particularly in these politically-charged
times, I think you might find that we won't get RTL until it works
"perfectly".

I have no idea what the RTL support in OS 10.5 is like (those who do, are
not saying...) or when the details became available to Microsoft. Remember
that Microsoft got badly burned by various things in OS X that were changed
very late in the design cycle when Microsoft was already committed? Some
Apple Mac enthusiasts thought it was rather funny at the time: Apple ended
up with these cool new features and Microsoft ended up looking like a dope.
Yeah, well I suspect it may be a while before Microsoft forgets that one

I suspect that for the next few years, we might see Microsoft adopting new
OS X features about two years after they have seen it working in the product
Apple has on sale. Sorry, but one of the things large corporations are
particularly allergic to is embarrassment

None of which takes away from your point, which is that we want
right-to-left support and we should have it. I just can't say whether it
will come in the next version or not (because I don't know...).

Cheers

--

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs

+61 4 1209 1410, <mailto:[email protected]> mailto:[email protected]