Re: Not Unicode, but... (Was Re: Unicode 3.0)

On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Paul Bennett wrote:

> Boudewijn kh=EBrpipng=EB=EBt:
> I haven't seen a version in some time, (the last version I saw was on Win=
3.11),
> but there is or was a Windows WP proggy called UniversalWord, which had
> mind-blowingly good Multi-language support.  IIRC, it had LTR-vs-RTL supp=
ort (no
> Vertical Script support), Surrounding Diacritics, Conjunct Characters (in=
cluding
> Arabic "Linked" Characters), Reprogrammable Keyboard Mappings and Multi-T=
TFs
> within one Character Set.  All of these features were fully user-configur=
able.
>=20
> The version I saw was non-Unicode (probably pre-Unicode?), but came with =
Fonts
> and Settings for at least a dozen Character Sets, such as Armenian, Russi=
an,
> Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari and Tamil.  What's more, it was Shareware!
> Unfortunately, at the time, I had no use for it, so it fell by the waysid=
e.  I'm
> pretty sure I've got it on CD somewhere, and I *may* be able to dig it ou=
t and
> email it to any interested Windows users.  I don't know if a new version =
is
> available, or if the such a version would use Unicode, but I'm going to l=
ook for
> an update tonight...
>=20
I have it somewhere as well. It was quite good as wordprocessors go,
but didn't do Unicode. And was limited to one page in the version I got
with PC-Plus. I've also been beta tester for Accent, which had cyrillic,
hebrew and arabic up its sleeves. I've given our last complimentary
copy to our priest, who needs to type French and Russian, often in
the same letter.  On Unix there is - or was - MtScript, which offered
word-processing in most scripts, but didn't do printing or Unicode -
which made it pretty useless.

All in all, I think that I already have the glyphs for most of Unicode=20
in various fonts on my hard-disk, and, in theory, all that one has to do
is make a bitmap, open the bitmap in Scanfont and drag it into a font,
to avoid copyright issues. But it _is_ an enormous amount of work.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt