by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/01/28 09:16 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/01/28/7265016.aspx
Over on the Microsoft VOLT users community, SpaceyT-17 asked:
What updates related to Uniscribe, locales and language support are to be released in Windows XP Service Pack 3?
To which O2K answered:
I wanted to ask the same. But seems it's not finalize yet and they are not disclosing anything about it. :(
Though to be honest some of this has been answered, in blogs like ELK stampede! (which has the 10 locales added post XPSP2 which are possibly going to be in the service pack.
And then there is How many versions does a bug have to exist before backporting the fix can't be successfully argued?, which pointed out a request to put the Romanian keyboard updates into the service pack, and the similar question about the Romanian/Bulgarian font updates I have talked about many times in the past.
So we don't know for sure, but clearly there are ten locales, a bunch of fonts, some keyboards, and no Uniscribe updates that are potential candidates based on these already available downloadable updates....
This post brought to you by Ș (U+0218, a.k.a. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW)
# oldmanjc on 2 Mar 2008 1:33 PM:
Long time ago, ISO wanted to make the code space from 128 to 255 variably assignable to non-English languages Many languages could be first romanized and then through the use of OpenType features shown in native scripts. The secret is that most languages are written phonetically and they have only around 40 phonemes just like English.
I tested this and have successfully developed the first smartfont for any language with an existing (complex) script. The beauty of the solution is that the language is instantly enabled in all regular commercial applications which, after all, is the ultimate goal of Unicode.
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# Michael S. Kaplan on 2 Mar 2008 2:07 PM:
That ISO pivot plan was insanity incarnate for MANY language that simply cannot fit within the strictures of even 256 let alone 128 characters.
(OpenType did not exist back then, technically neither did TrueType, even)
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