Subject: Re: (SC22WG20.1658) RE: Personal contribution to ISO/IEC on some problems with WinWordor RTF formats for ISO/IEC electronic document distribution

From: "Alain LaBont/e'/" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 21:46:24 -0400

At 16:31 1996-10-10 -0700, Michel Suignard wrote:
>I routinely exchange documents with
>Japanese collegues using their Japanese version without problems.

Michel, do you use the Japanese version yourself ? (Because I do not work at
Microsoft, this is almost impossible for me).

Last Friday, a Japanese colleague gave me a text produced on a Japanese
version of Word. I kept it (I can send it to you if you wish). I can't read
it with the French version of Word. It says "unrecognizable format".

I asked him to redo it in RTF format. Since it was a plain English document,
we did not have a font problem. This I could read without any difficulty
indeed. But it delayed things. And would there have been a need for a
specific font, we would not have been warned that we were doing something
"wrong".

That said, this should be seen as an encouragement to Microsoft to find
solutions. I tried to be correct in my contribution, conscious that I may
also be wrong. I am confident that all these problems will be much less of
an issue in 10 years. Already the support of the UCS by Word as a native
character set in the near future will be a considerable improvement that
will at least solve
most of the character integrity problems in practice (right now fonts are
confused with characters in Word, but the trend will completely eliminate
this problem, hopefully).

Alain LaBonté