The future of "Transitional": Japanese concern

[Shawn Villaron]

I took Murata-san's point about MS Office in the general sense of implementers.  But perhaps that's just me ...

-----Original Message-----
From: Innovimax SARL [mailto:innovimax at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 10:32 PM
To: MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)
Cc: SC 34 WG4
Subject: Re: The future of "Transitional": Japanese concern

Murata san,

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 2:14 AM, MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given) <eb2m-mrt at asahi-net.or.jp> wrote:
> Francis,
>
> (Again wearing my Japanese hat)
>
>> The agreed UK position is that the purpose of the Transitional 
>>conformance class and features, as specified in Part 4, is to provide 
>>faithful representation of legacy documents.
>
> It appears that your understanding of "legacy documents" appears to be 
> different from ours.  In our understading, document that have been or 
> will be created, modified, or viewed  by legacy software are legacy 
> documents.  After all, isn't it very difficult to create strict 
> documents using existing MS Office in the future?

Probably, but again, the goal of this WG is not to talk about MS Office implementations (especially the future one) , is it ?

>
>>If the old versions of Microsoft Office and other systems that were 
>>used to produce these legacy documents were unable to format text in 
>>all languages correctly (which is hardly surprising, by the way), Part 
>>4 should enable us to represent those documents faithfully INCLUDING 
>>all typographic lacunae. In other words, if a typographic feature was 
>>missing and could not be expressed in a legacy document, it would be 
>>wrong to try to rewrite history by enhancing Part 4 and thereby 
>>"correcting" the presentation of old documents.
>
> An important omission in MS Word is not  inability to format documents 
> correctly but rather inability to recognize page layout specified in 
> terms of KIHONHANMEN (see 2.2.4 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-jlreq-20090604/#en-subheading1_1_4
> of the requirement document) rather than margins.  I guess that it is 
> possible to create OOXML extensions so that documents can contain 
> specifications in terms of KIHONHAMEN *as well as* margins.  Legacy 
> software is expected to handle such documents and produce good layout 
> using margin information, while new applications can further provide 
> better user interfaces in terms of KIHONHANMEN.

I'm afraid you're talking about the behaviour of an implementation there.
The second point is that you're talking about high level typography :
I never understood that Word was about high quality typography although I understand SVG, XSL-FO and CSS are.

My understanding is that KIHONHAMEN typography characteristics are not
*generally* captured today (as ARABIC typography in most of the case).
I said *generally* in the sense of "telling the software that you are in KIHONHAMEN mode"
On the other hand, MS Word (since we are again talking about an
implementation) has never been about capturing general typography information, but largely more about capturing local information (see how tables are treated line by line in Word) ; Here again, local information that have been set by user in "legacy" document (that will have to be defined in Paris) -- and not legacy implementations -- needs to be captured in ISO 29500 T (if it is not already in ECMA 376).

Mohamed


--
Innovimax SARL
Consulting, Training & XML Development
9, impasse des Orteaux
75020 Paris
Tel : +33 9 52 475787
Fax : +33 1 4356 1746
http://www.innovimax.fr
RCS Paris 488.018.631
SARL au capital de 10.000 €