November, 2012

Earlier this month, someone reached out to me on Twitter.

Unfortunately for @KristoferA, I don't pay enough attention to my Twitter account!

Being in post-op rehab is no excuse.

This will be my 7,300th tweet, so maybe I should get better at this.

Sorry about that!

I think the ISO 639 code for Burmese is actually my.

Though I wouldn't recommend running over to .NET or Windows and trying my-MM, because the locale isn't supported.

We have lots of locales, to be sure.

But not that one.

Of course, we did add font, shaping, and keyboard support in Windows 8.

You can add it to the Language list, even, just by typing "Burmese" into the search box of the "Add language" dialog:

If you add it, you'll get a fun surprise.

Check out the dialog:

It knew to add the Myanmar keyboard layout.

Cool! :-)

So, no locale yet. But we started getting some support in.

The font is exquisite.

And the way everything came together to work here is kinda impressive.

There really was intent here to make a scenario work well, in a very integrated manner.

You would have to create a custom locale to come full circle and finish the job, but that too is an option.

Now I think that soon I'll give an example that doesn't show us in as flattering of a light.

Just so you don't start thinking we are too impressive. :-)

Stay tuned...

Kind of a footnote to Announcing The Unicode Standard, Version 6.2 (and a little about what MS is doing about it), and all of the exciting things Microsoft did for the Turkish Lira.

First described at the 36th Internationalization and Unicode conference, last month...

You know, that character.

A bunch of work happened.

Some of it, I even did myself!

We fixed the locale.

We added it to some fonts.

And some keyboards.

You can even see it with the On-Screen Keyboard!

Unless you try to mix in the On-Screen Keyboard and Microsoft Word.

In which case one of those "helpful" Word keyboard shortcuts will intervene:

And instead of

₺

(aka U+20ba, aka TURKISH LIRA SIGN)

it will insert

™

(aka U+2122, aka TRADE MARK SIGN)

Gotta love those "helpful" Word shortcuts, huh? :-)

Steven R. Loomis summed it up nicely on Twitter:

Dammit....

At least it was just in Lira!

Maybe Word needs to remove its "helpful' shortcut in this case?

Here it is, if you're Turkish and/or you'd like to remove it yourself:

Man, if it's in Word that means it's in Outlook, too.

That's just embarrassing!

Stu, could you look into this one? :-)

Speaking of user interface simplification changes in Windows 8....

Remember this one?

This is UI that < 5% of all users ever launched, and < 5% of that tiny group ever modified the settings.

And half of them undid the changes after that!

Really, they want this to be less common.

Thus the new default Match Windows Display Language (Recommended) setting.

Over here:

This UI shows a LOT of language stuff, such as:

• The Windows display language in use;
• Other available Windows display languages one can switch to;
• The language of Date, time, and number formatting (aka the default user locale);
• Any and all keyboards in use.

 There's more, but I can get into the rest some other time.

I have mixed feelings about this new user interface -- some good, and some bad.

How do others feel about it?