Unicode problems

[Robert DeLossa]

I'm not sure the Mac enthusiasts can crow here. As fate would have it, I've
just started using Word 98 for Mac (approx. = 97 for Windows) and got a
unicode document from Kyiv. Most of it came out okay in Word 98, except
that several characters don't show on the screen. They print okay, but you
cannot read it on the screen, since these characters default to a
microspace (thus you cannot de visu tell from your screen display that they
are not there)... The text displays properly in Word 6.0 for Mac (=95 for
Windows), so the problem must be integral and similar to what is going on
with Brouwer's text in Word for Windows 97. However, the "fix" he describes
didn't help my situation. This is not completely surprising, since Windows
Word '97 was upgraded and recompiled for Mac '98, but I suspect that there
still is a similar basic higher ASCII problem here.

Thus, any solutions out there would be equally welcome for the Mac side as
for the Windows side.

Robert DeLossa

p.s. Because of precisely these sorts of bugs, I keep Word 5.1, 6.01, and
'98 on my machine. I've found it is the only way to be fully compatible
with everything that comes into my office (being a publisher, I get a great
variety of versions from bost East and West). Microsoft has added nice
bells and whistles along the way, but also new headaches with each new
feature. They also have an extremely annoying habit of "retiring" useful
converters and features from one version's full install to the next (though
I've found some older resources to be compatible with new versions). My
experience with MS tech support is that none seems to have a handle on the
program they are responsible for. I suspect that all of MS' products have
become so unwieldy and bloated, code-wise, that they are unknowable for
tech support and these sorts of unintended problems are unavoidable.
Perhaps this is the spiritual revenge of the Edsel on us all.


>Dear Seelangers,
>
>When I import a plain text (.txt) file with Cyrillic into Word 97
>(8.0) and apply a unicode font like Times New Roman or Courier
>New to that text, no Cyrillic appears. Only non-unicode ER fonts show
>Cyrillic.
>
>I understand that this is because in Word 97, there is no way to tell
>the text that its higher ASCII-values belong to the Cyrillic subset,
>and not to Latin-1.
>
>As far as I know, the only thing one can do is save the file as Word
>6.0/95, open it in Word 95 (7.0), apply the Times New Roman Cyrillic
>font (in Word 95, the subsets of Unicode fonts appear as different
>fonts), save the change, and reopen the file under Word 97. But that
>amounts to not using Word 97 at all and work under Word 95, which is
>actually what I do. Still - k chemu besplodno sporit' s vekom? - in a
>while we will somehow all be forced to work with Word 97, so I'd like
>to solve the problem now.
>
>Who has any soobrazheniya on this? (besides the obvious
>you-should-have-bought-yourself-a-Mac-in-the-first-place).
>
>Thanks in advance,
>Sander Brouwer
>
>Dr.S.Brouwer  Assistant Professor
>Slavic Dept.  University of Groningen
>Postbus 716   9700 AS Groningen   The Netherlands
>tel: +31 50 3636062            home: +31 50 3119769
>fax: +31 50 3635821      www.oprit.rug.nl/brouwer02
>
>Izuchenie russkoy istorii mozhet portit' samye luchshie umy
>                                   T.Granovskii


____________________________________________________
Robert DeLossa
Director of Publications
Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University
1583 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138
617-496-8768; fax. 617-495-8097
reply to: rdelossa at fas.harvard.edu
http://www.sabre.org/huri