Re: [tlug] CrossOver Office

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Micheal" == Micheal E Cooper <Micheal> writes:

    Micheal> I wasn't aware that the English version of Office reads
    Micheal> and allows input of Japanese.

What makes you think there is any such thing as an "English" version
of Office anymore?  My bet is that if you look into the registry
you'll find an entry like:

[Word]
CanDoJapanese=MustPayAntitrustFine---MakeThemBuyNihongoPan

That's more than the apocryphal 12 bytes, though....

    Micheal> What do they do about Ruby text (furigana)

What about it?  It's no different from math in general, or simple
superscript handling for that matter.

    Micheal> and vertical writing, I wonder.

This is harder; it turns out that top-to-bottom right-to-left is not
"rotate the page 90 degrees, then rotate the font -90 degrees".  It
either requires separate fonts or fairly smart fonts, for one thing.

    Micheal> For that matter, can Linux do those things?

Depends on what you mean by that.  ASCII ptex/platex have no problem
with producing ruby text and vertical documents.  I don't know if they
can handle mixed-direction text (common in government docs soudesu).
And Omega (Haramboulos and Plaice's 16-bit TeX) is not about multiple
scripts, really, it's about different cultures' usage of space, which
TeX's "rows of \vbox" model doesn't handle very well.  Omega is happy
to mix vertical Chinese, horizontal Japanese, Mongolian which is
top-to-bottom left-to-right, bidirectional Arabic, and first l2r then
r2l ancient Greek all on one page.

But TeXs are not WYSIWYG.  I think that's a good thing, but most
people seem to prefer WYSIWYG.

[J Byrne]
    >> WRT Abiword at all, while I do not have to deal with highly
    >> complex MS Office documents [1], and happily rarely have to
    >> deal with them at all, I have had no problems with correctly
    >> reading MS Word and Excel documents with Abiword and Gnumeric.

I tried an xls document with Gnumeric last night, and it swallowed it
but displayed nothing because it couldn't make fontsets.  Yes, I do
have all the registries it claimed it couldn't find.  I didn't
investigate further yet, but I'm not impressed.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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