Unicode Software Arriving, Slowly but Surely

No one debates that it is a great idea, but Unicode has not caught on overnight. But if it is up to Gamma Productions, you might be working with a Unicode application sooner than you think.

While the Unicode definition has been sanctified by the powers that be (in this case, the ISO) and the Unicode Consortium is actively promoting the stan, dard through implementation workshops and the like, tangible evidence of its actual use is still scant.
    Still, there are rays of hope. Last summer, Gamma Productions, the developer of the well,established DOS package Multilingual Scholar, started shipping Gamma UniVerse, the first Unicode compliant word, processor. According to Gamma, UniVerse, which runs under Windows, supports all of the world’s languages, including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean with the help of an add-on utility called TwinBridge. With UniVerse, users can mix any combination of languages within a document, even on the same line. Bundled with the program is Languagelink, a key’ board utility written by Dortmund developers link & Link which facilitates entering various Latin and Cyrillic characters sets from standard Western Euro, pean keyboards. An integral part of UniVerse is WinLanguage, what Gamma describes as an “interim specification” for languages which are not yet sup’ ported by Microsoft. Other companies have rallied around WinLanguage, including font house Bitstream, Circle Noetic Services, TA Electronic Publishing, link & link, and LinguaSoft.

Gamma has priced UniVerse aggressively, pitching it at US$149 in the US and US$199 in Europe. A new version of UniVerse is expected imminently, which, among other things, will be addressing some of the performance problems of the first release as well as supporting Chinese and Japanese directly. (Gamma has licensed fonts and a rasterizer for these languages from Bitstream.) According to Gamma’s technical director Gary Rosen, UniVerse has enjoyed sales of over three thousand copies since its release. In addition, “all of the US Government language and intelligence services are standardizing on the Gamma Unicode technologies,” he says.
As the first commercial application of Unicode, UniVerse is an obvious milestone. More significant in the long-term, however, could be Gamma’s Unicode Server, a toolkit in the form of a 3-,bit DLL which provides Windows programmers with a complete set of Unicode,based text services for their applications. This includes such things as keyboard layouts and input facilities for converting user input into Unicode, contextual analysis, character properties, ligatures and font mappings, hyphenation, and interfaces for thesauri and spellcheckers. While an operating system like Windows NT advertises Unicode support in its file system, it offers no facilities for processing alternate scripts in applications, and this is a lacuna which Gamma is addressing. Programming alternate scripts is a complex matter which is virtually impossible without an intimate linguistic knowledge of the language involved.

Unicode Server is part of a two’part solution that Gamma plans to offer to OEM’s. Later this year, additional software modules will appear for handling various user interface issues. There will also be a Unicode,compliant line layout manager. According to Rosen, these will be extracted from the next release of UniVerse, restructured, and repackaged for OEM use. The complete solution will be called the Unicode Toolkit. Initially, Gamma was equipped to handle only a few sales of Unicode Server, and “those are in the queue,” says Rosen. However, he says Gamma will be able to support a larger number of OEM customers during the coming year.
    ”Many people, even some of those in the Unicode Consortium, say Unicode is not yet real,” comments Rosen. “It is real, it is being accepted, and it is ship’ ping to satisfied customers.”

While Gamma plunges ahead, Microsoft is also slowly readying itself for Unicode. According to various sources, the latest version of several of its packages, most notably those bundled together as Microsoft Office, are at least partly “two,byte” aware. However, as a whole, Microsoft does not give the impression of having defined a uniform strategy for Unicode across all of its many products, in stark contrast, for example, to Apple. This is a tragedy, for Unicode is far too valuable an initiative to be left to ad hoc implement’ ation by the various application groups within world’s most influential software company.
It still looks like it will be many years before Unicode fulfills its potential as the global interchange medium. Only in the past few months has Compu’ Serve, for example, finally made the step from seven, to eight,bit ASCII, thereby allowing users to send messages with accents — finally.

Gamma Productions, 710 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 609, Santa Monica CA, 90401, USA; Tel: + 1 310 394 8622, Fax: + 1 310 395 4214