[nemanirc]

Does Office 2004 support Unicode characters? For instance, can I insert a ½ into a Word document instead of typing 1/2? In Word v.X, there is no access to these unicode characters. If I paste the same character into Word, it comes back as a _ .

[Busemann]

Yes, Office 2004 has full unicode support

[selowitch]

Originally posted by Busemann:
Yes, Office 2004 has full unicode support

It would be more correct to say that Office 2004 has partial Unicode support. It does not support Arabic, Farsi, or Hebrew, for example -- all of which are part of the Unicode standard.

[Tom C]

Originally posted by selowitch:
It would be more correct to say that Office 2004 has partial Unicode support. It does not support Arabic, Farsi, or Hebrew, for example -- all of which are part of the Unicode standard.

The explanation that I heard before Office 2004 came out is that support is not guaranteed for right-to-left alphabets because Office uses custom text-handling routines instead of the built-in Carbon routines and MS didn't think there were enough users to justify the trouble of building in support for right-to-left alphabets.

However, the Office 2004 docs don't say anything about right-to-left alphabets not working, and I just gave Arabic and Hebrew a spin and they seemed OK to me. But I don't know what I was typing!

As for languages that I do know, I've tried Greek and it works just fine. You can load Greek files created with Word for Windows, too - the cross-compatibility of the file formats includes Unicode.

[selowitch]

Originally posted by Tom C:
However, the Office 2004 docs don't say anything about right-to-left alphabets not working, and I just gave Arabic and Hebrew a spin and they seemed OK to me. But I don't know what I was typing!

I can pretty much guarantee that they're screwed up in some fashion, although I have yet to try them.

[nemanirc]

In the Office 2004 test drive, it finally does an autocorrect on fractions like the Wintel counterpart does (it is able to display fractions because of the more robust Unicode support). However, something funny happens. There is a new contextual menu feature when something was autocorrected. It lets you undo this occurance, stop all autocorrections of this type, or open the auto correct preference panel and look at the options. There is no option for fraction autocorrecting in the preferences, even though it does it automatically. Did someone at Microsoft fall asleep on this one? Clearly someone's job was to add the functionality. I guess no one looked at the preferences pane and said, "Wow, that was a lot of work to add that autocorrect feature. Let's make sure users know how to activate and deactivate it."