I find it hard to believe that there aren’t still many people out there who want to continue using certain Type 1 fonts. I think the problem here is that it’s a combination of two factors: using Type 1 fonts [strong]and[/strong] using the non-breaking space. Since the non-breaking space is mostly used by non-U.S. people, it makes the bug less important in the eyes of Microsoft.

Again, I do not know whether this bug has been fixed in the French version of Word 2004. It’s quite possible that it has been fixed. But why they haven’t also fixed it in the English version is beyond me, especially after all this time.

To be entirely fair, Apple’s own Pages also has a somewhat similar problem with certain Type 1 fonts. Only the symptoms in Pages are not as obvious, and they seem to only affect a subset of the category of Type 1 fonts (those that do not include a non-breaking space in their char set, I think). But it’s nearly as shameful for Apple as it is for Microsoft, especially since the symptoms have to do with line spacing and Apple has designed Pages as a page layout application.

Given that the problem also affects Pages in some way, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were linked to an underlying cause in Mac OS X, and Microsoft just couldn’t be bothered to pressurize Apple to fix it.

I’ll admit that I no longer have a problem with this because I am more or less forced to use Times New Roman or Ariel in my work (Chemistry) because the versions of these fonts that come with Office 2004 have unicode tiers for Greek letters (even in italic and boldface) that most other typefaces (even Verdana) lack. I am not aware of any OpenType or oldstyle Postscript fonts with comparable features. Now, in the days of Word v.X, one was forced to obtain greek letters for equations and math stuff in the main text from the so-called “symbol” fonts, such as Symbol and Adobe’s Universal Greek or Math Pi.

So, Pierre, I guess that the MacBU would tell us that the “opportunity cost” of implementing proper support for OpenType and/or Postscript into Office 2004 at this point is just too high. I submit, however, that the MacBU didn’t even test for proper compatibility prior to the original shipment of Office 2004, and now they don’t care because, like it or not, only a few people actually use non-TrueType fonts.

Yes, multi-linguality is tough. While the situation with it is better today than it ever was (thanks to Cocoa’s relatively simple localisation techniques) it is still rather bleak. In particular as the technique of localising things is so simple now, we start seeing loads of rather bad localisations that make me want to use the English version instead.

I certainly feel that my own “bilingual” situation is not all that unusual, especially not outside the U.S. There are many European and Asian companies these days who use not just the local language but also English in business communications, etc. In that respect, Microsoft is still far too U.S.-centric—although they are hardly alone in that department.

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When dealing with MS, I wonder how large those ’small’ groups of users are which require certain functions. With their complete market domination that should easily be many thousands if not millions.