Chris Pratley

1
and
Unicode

• Chris Pratley
• Lead Program Manager
• Microsoft Office

2
Overview

• Office Unicode strategy
• Implementation
• Benefits of Unicode to Office users
• Demo of Word2000

3
Office Unicode Strategy

• Office97 driving factors
• Customers operate world-wide (US only 40)
• Need to handle multiple code pages in Europe
• Office97 goals
• Enable loss-less file exchange world-wide
• Solve code page problems in Europe
• Development efficiency for Asian and Euro
  versions
• Unified source code base but still different
  executables
• Unified development process
• Delta between language versions shrinks from 18
  to 2 months
• Lay foundation for future

4
Office2000 Unicode Strategy

• Office2000 goals
• Reduce Total Cost of Ownership for large
  corporations
• Single version to deploy and administer globally
• Configurable interface to handle local needs
• Language of User Interface can be changed
• Additional language features can be enabled as
  needed
• Emulate any localized version
• Français, ???, ??, ?????,????, etc.
• Streamline development process further
• Core US team ships global product
• Integrate bi-directional version team (Arabic,
  Hebrew)
• Focus on needs of bilingual and multilingual users

5
The Word Family Tree
6
Implementation

• Core applications are Unicode internally
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint (Office97)
• Access (new in Office2000)
• Databases are now Unicode
• Remaining apps and applets
• Inter-operate with Unicode apps
• Will move to Unicode in next release

7
Implementation

• Difficulties encountered with Unicode
• Character code unification
• Many punctuation were unified that are very
  different (especially full-width / half-width)
• Interoperation with code-page based systems
• If the code page is not known, converting data to
  Unicode is hard - lots of bugs here
• Things that had worked by accident were broken
• Educating test team about Unicode vs. MBCS

8
Implementation

• Multi-font support groups characters
• ASCII (0-127 range in ISO-8859-1)
• Asian (all full-width double byte, plus
  half-width katakana)
• Complex Script (composing scripts such as
  Bi-di, Thai, Indic)
• Other (all other single byte characters)
• Do not apply fonts to characters not supported by
  the font
• Otherwise applying MS P???? to Montréal would
  become Montr?al
• Likewise applying Arial to ??? would become
  
• Unified characters are hinted where necessary
• Asian full-width never becomes European
  proportional
• Full-width Cyrillic and Greek never become
  proportional

9
Office Users Benefit

• Single binary world-wide
• Shared world-wide file formats
• Multilingual word/data processing
• Unicode HTML
• Unicode e-mail (HTML, RTF, plain)

10
Single Binary

• Easier to deploy, administer
• One set-up image to install world-wide
• One set of service packs for all machines
• All features available in all versions
• Still have local version packages
• Multilingual users can use foreign features
• User Interface language is configurable
• Your language follows you when you travel
• Major cost savings for customers
• Less testing of corporate solutions
• Lower internal tech support costs

11
Single File Format

• Multinational corporations use Office
• Need to exchange documents company-wide
• Office unified file formats via Unicode
• Word95 had 7 different file formats
• Word97 had 1 file format but no editing, layout
  for languages covered by other versions
• Word2000 adds editing, layout, and full-roundtrip

12
Multilingual Word/Data Processing

• English Office2000 input/display/edit/layout of
• European languages
• any similar left-right scripts if fonts/NLS
  available
• Asian languages
• Chinese (Traditional and Simplified)
• Japanese
• Korean
• Bi-directional languages (requires enabled
  system)
• Arabic (incl. Farsi, Urdu)
• Hebrew
• Thai/Vietnamese/Indic require local version

13
Multilingual Word Processing

• Most documents are monolingual
• Most users are bilingual
• Local language
• English
• Optimize UI for using one, two or three languages
• Over 100 supported rare usage
• Detect over 20 languages as they are typed
• Automatically install and use the correct
  proofing tools

14
Multilingual Word Processing

• Proofing tool interfaces are Unicode
• Spelling, Grammar, Hyphenation, Thesaurus
• Tools for over 30 languages available
• Most European languages
• Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew
• Additional tools
• Traditional/Simplified Chinese conversion
• Hangul/Hanja conversion
• Japanese character usage consistency checker
• Dictionaries integration with Microsoft
  BookShelf

15
Multilingual Data Processing

• Access databases are Unicode
• Hook up to SQL7.0 Unicode databases
• Excel workbooks are Unicode
• Hook up to Unicode databases using OLE-DB
• Create Pivot lists and manipulate Unicode data
• PowerPoint creates multilingual multimedia
• Use VBA to generate learning tools, multilingual
  kiosk demos

16
Unicode HTML

• HTML is a companion file format
• Roundtrip all formatting
• Save to web servers
• Roundtrip Unicode data in any encoding
• UTF-8 and UTF-16 are supported too
• HTML is tagged with encoding
• URLs are UTF-8
• Plain text I/O in any encoding (Word)

17
Unicode e-mail

• Office2000 provides fully multilingual email
• HTML mail uses internet standards
• All Unicode content preserved
• Plugs into Outlook, Outlook Express, Exchange
• Use Word to compose replies and new messages
• Send in plain text, RTF, or HTML
• All applications can mail documents as HTML

18
Future Directions

• Work with Windows2000 towards a worldwide
  platform
• Unicode 3.0 languages too
• Fold in Thai, Vietnamese, Indic language support
• Extend Unicode support to more applications
• Outlook
• FrontPage
• PhotoDraw
• Visual Basic Editor and Forms
• Publisher
• Works
• Work with tools group (Visual Studio) to make
  globalization technology available to developers

19
Microsoft Word2000 onWindows2000

• Demo

20
Questions

• Answers