[Lexicog] Spellchecking Unicode in MS-Office

[Mike Maxwell]

Benjamin Barrett wrote:
> I was surprised at the claim that Word is MS is knowledgeable about 
> internationalization. 

Their top-level page on this is
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/default.aspx

To take an example that I know about, they handle the Bengali script 
better than either the Mac or Linux.  And Word makes a tolerable attempt 
at displaying the Nasta'liq Arabic script with a suitable font (although 
I confess that we've been using XeTeX to typeset Urdu in this script).

Also, several years ago Google's search engine was broken if you tried 
to search for text in the Ethiopic range of Unicode (they eventually 
fixed it).  I discovered that Microsoft Search worked for Internet 
searches with the Ethiopic script just fine.  (No, I don't use Microsoft 
Search on a regular basis--but I desperately needed something at the 
time to look for Tigrinya texts, and Ms was the search engine that worked.)

> While they have grudgingly gotten better over the years 

or perhaps people grudgingly admit that they have gotten better...

> the last I checked, Explorer still could not handle all of the 
> characters in Lushootseed, the language local to Redmond, Washington! 

I expect that nearly extinct languages are not high on their priority 
list, no matter where they are spoken.  Maybe some enterprising UW 
student will work on that problem.

BTW, what Lushootseed characters can't it handle?  What I see on the 
Wikipedia page for "Southern Lushootseed Salmonid Vocabulary" looks OK 
to me in IE 7, although I have to admit I probably wouldn't know it if 
it was wrong.  (It looks a little worse in Firefox--the glottal stops in 
particular look cut off.  That's probably a function of the font choice, 
which I can't figure out how to override in either program.)  Just for 
fun, I copied this vocabulary list over to Word 2003, where it appeared 
to me to render OK in several IPA-capable fonts.

(OK, it does start to look odd in IE if I increase the font size, 
whereas FF looks about the same at all font sizes, except the glottal 
stop is weird.  Odd that IE should look worse when blown up.  Probably a 
function of the font, in both cases.)

This Lushootseed website--
    http://www.tulaliplushootseed.com/
recommends IE 6 (my guess is that that recommendation is old, and that 
they would now recommend IE 7).

> Of course the two-letter language codes that Windows offers 

What two-letter codes?  I see full names, often with a country 
specified, when I try e.g. to add a new input language, like "Mapudungun 
(Chile)" or "Norwegian (Bokmal)".
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu

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