Unicode and Windows XP Cathy Wissink Program Manager

Unicode and Windows XP Cathy Wissink Program Manager, Globalization Windows Division Microsoft 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Agenda l l l Brief Overview of Approach and History International Functionality on Windows What’s Different in Windows XP? What’s Beyond Windows XP? Conclusions and Resources 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Approach and History 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Our Approach (or: How did we get where we are today? ) l l l Include full Unicode support from onset Leverage Uniscribe, Open. Type, NLS Migrate towards a single worldwide source (reached in Windows 2000) Develop and refine Multilingual User Interface functionality Continue to add new international functionality (Windows Text Services Framework, etc. ) 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Our History (or: Well, how did we get here? ) Genesis of NT (1991): Go with Unicode! l NT 4. 0 (1996): many Unicode components, but still strong code page dependency l NT 5. 0, renamed Windows 2000 (2000): single worldwide source l Windows XP (2001): merge of the NT international functionality with the consumer experience of Windows 95/98/ME l 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

International Functionality l NLS (National Language Support), including the locale model l Uniscribe (including Open. Type) l Windows Text Services Framework l MUI (Multilingual User Interface Pack for Windows) 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

National Language Support NLS provides the information that supports culturally appropriate behavior: Sorting and casing l Formatting (dates, times, currency, numbers) l Conversions (normalization, character encodings) l Other (calendars, native digits) l 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

National Language Support, cont. NLS data for a particular culture grouped into a locale (generally, a country + language combination). There were different types of “locales” on Windows 2000, which have been renamed for Windows XP (as seen in Regional Options)… 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Locales Windows 2000 “User locale” Windows XP “Standards and Formats” (cultural conventions and data) “Input locale” “Input Language and Method” (keyboards and IMEs) “System locale” “Language for non. Unicode Programs” (code page conversions) 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Uniscribe The technology used to handle the layout, rendering and editing of complex scripts 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Examples of Complex Scripts 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Some of the text issues handled by Uniscribe l Word breaking (Thai) l Bi-directional text (Hebrew, Arabic) l Multiple diacritics on a base character (Vietnamese) l Contextual shaping (Indic, Arabic) l Illegal character combination filtering (Thai) 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Windows Text Services Framework l New to Windows XP! l Extends input methods to include natural language recognition (speech, handwriting) 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

MUI l Short for Multilingual User Interface l MUI changes language of the system’s menus, dialogs and Help files into one of 24 different languages l Available as add-on pack for Windows XP Professional (Multilingual User Interface Pack) 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

MUI, continued l MUI built by copying resources from localized versions l Testers check for same issues as for localized versions l Resource loader checks user’s UI language setting to load the appropriate resources 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

MUI vs. other international functionality l MUI – changes the user’s UI language – only available as an add-on pack to the English version of Windows XP l All other international functionality – impacts language content and formatting – available on all versions of Windows XP 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

What’s new for Windows XP? 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

NLS l 9 new locales + invariant locale; 136 locales total – Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, Kannada, Kyrgyz, Mongolian (Cyrillic), Galician, Divehi and Syriac l Old Hangul sorting l GB 18030 encoding l New location (“Geo”) APIs l Overhaul of Regional Options 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Regional Options 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Uniscribe l New script support – Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Telugu, Divehi, and Syriac Improvements to resolution, layout and formatting made possible by GDI+ l Default system installation of Uniscribe l Improved font fallback support l 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

MUI Closer parity to 100% localized builds: – UI strings removed from registry and kernel – Improvements to Shell, Desktop and Console resource handling – Help files enabled for UI language switching 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

If you take away just one thing from this talk… As a result of pervasive Unicode support built into Windows XP, international functionality (except MUI) is available on all versions This includes: l Localized versions l MUI version l Base (English) version 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

What’s beyond Windows XP? 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Looking to the future… l New research for languages and cultures l Marry MUI and localization? l Eventual goal: “English is just another language” 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Resources l Windows Global Development Website http: //www. microsoft. com/globaldev/ mailto: gdhelp@microsoft. com (Global Dev Help) mailto: drintl@microsoft. com (Dr. International) l Microsoft Typography Website (Open. Type, Uniscribe) http: //www. microsoft. com/typography 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Other Related Talks at IUC 18 (later today) l Kaplan, Surrogate Support on MS Products l Hall, MUI on Windows 2000 (proceedings to earlier presentations) l Pratley, Unicode in Office XP l Kaplan, Unicode and SQL Collation 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Well, what about us Win 9 x fans? l Gee, not everyone can go out and buy Windows XP tomorrow… l Some of us have a customer base on Windows 95/98/ME… l We’d love to be able to write Unicode apps, but we have to run on both NT and Win 9 x… 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows 95/98/ME Systems (MSLU) Goals: extend the NT set of Unicode APIs to the Windows 95/98/ME platforms l provide a means for customers to reasonably compile Unicode versions of their applications l further promote the use of Unicode l 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)

Why MSLU? l Too much need for single binary on NT and Win 9 x platforms l Cannot fully leverage Unicode without some support mechanism on down-level Win 9 x platforms l MS needed to provide a solution that is included in the Platform SDK 26 April 2001 Unicode and Windows XP, IUC 18 (Hong Kong)