What are Corel's goals regarding support of Unicode and OpenType

[Andrew Bokelman]

Are they moving on this. Do they think it is important. Will OpenType
support at least be in the next release of Ventura and Draw.

[Fish]

I think OpenType is natively supported by Windows 2000... at least, my
Fonts folder shows a number of OpenType fonts, and they're all usable in
Ventura.

Full Unicode support is, IMO, highly unlikely. There are some truly
strange written languages out there -- Farsi, for instance (IIRC), has
letterforms that *change shape* depending on the surrounding several
characters! Windows doesn't deal with this natively, AFAIK, and it'd be
one heck of a challenge to implement it (and to what end? I suspect the
number of Farsi publications wouldn't begin to pay for the cost of
development.)

I certainly would hope, though, that right-to-left and vertical
languages get supported. There are some interesting challenges there,
too: how do you layout a line which contains a left-to-right word that
gets hyphenated?

How do you handle a hyphenated word that is in a backwards line?

?enil sdrawkcab a ni si taht drow hyphen-
ated a eldnah uoy od woH

?enil sdrawkcab a ni si taht drow -ated
hyphen a eldnah uoy od woH

[Andrew Bokelman]

In article <1106_10...@cnews.corel.ca>, fff...@operamail.com says...

I do not know what would be involved in the situational placement that
Open Type supports, but this is the most extreme example of what could be
in an Open Type font. There are simpler things such as ligatures,
swatches, and small caps that will be found in the same Open Type font
that holds the more routine characters. I don't think access to these is
unreasonable. Also, considering that WordPad manages to support unicode,
I don't think it is too much to ask a pro level DTP program such as
Ventura to be able to do the same.

...Andrew

[Michael Friedman]

Hear hear!

I for one will not upgrade further until WP supports ligature and other
characters built into today's fonts.

[Manolis Christodoulou]

Me too. That's the reason I didn't upgrated to WPO2002. My native language
is greek. WP8 and WP9 surface a lot of bugs with non-latin alphabets. The
most annoying is saving a document as PDF, exchanging documents with MS
products, inability to print non-latin characters from CorelCentral, QP8/9
can not display the proper non-latin font in the input line and sheet name,
and finally the good-old-and-never-fixed relative font sizes bug.

Undoubtedly Corel will find new markets if it will migrate their software to
Unicode.

--
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Dr. Manolis Christodoulou MD. |
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"Michael Friedman" <michaelja...@no.spam.earthlink.net> wrote in
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[Andrew Bokelman]

I read a message in the Draw group that Draw now supports unicode. But I
don't know if it is full support. WordPerfect has some sort of unicode
support, but it is so limited I've had to view some documents in WordPad.
It also make sense to support OpenType as a way to support Unicode. But
I don't know all that would be involved with this.

In article <3c1cfc87_2@cnews>, mch...@pel.forthnet.gr says...

[Michael Friedman]

I wrote to Corel about this. The reply, from the marketing department,
said that unicode support would require a major rewrite of WP. From the
letter's tone, I was left to expect that such a rewrite was not in the
works.

I am fairly pleased with WP10 sp2 although for me it was mostly an
expensive patch from WP 9. The only two things that will cause me to pay
for future upgrades are: (1) unicode support, or some other way to
access ligatures and other characters built into today's fonts; or (2)
the ability to view and edit all footnotes in a single pane. Right now I
use WP for all my word processing needs, _except_ my dissertation, which
is in Word for this reason.

Michael Jay Friedman
Doctoral Candidate in American History
Univ. of Pennsylvania
michaelja...@no.spam.earthlink.net

[Michael Friedman]

I wrote to Corel about this. The reply, from the marketing department,
said that unicode support would require a major rewrite of WP. From the
letter's tone, I was left to expect that such a rewrite was not in the
works.

I am fairly pleased with WP10 sp2 although for me it was mostly an
expensive patch from WP 9. The only two things that will cause me to pay
for future upgrades are: (1) unicode support, or some other way to
access ligatures and other characters built into today's fonts; or (2)
the ability to view and edit all footnotes in a single pane. Right now I
use WP for all my word processing needs, _except_ my dissertation, which
is in Word for this reason.

Michael Jay Friedman
Doctoral Candidate in American History
Univ. of Pennsylvania
michaelja...@no.spam.earthlink.net