The default Vietnamese keyboard layout of Mac OS X follows a National Standard of Vietnam, numbered TCVN 6064:1995. When typing with this keyboard, Vietnamese text is generated according to the Unicode encoding standard.

Vietnamese Keyboard Set provides additional keyboards with both alternative typing methods and alternative encodings for Vietnamese text to be generated. The alternative typing methods are Vietnamese-Telex, Vietnamese-VNI, and Vietnamese-AZERTY, a variant of the Vietnamese-Telex typing method based on the French AZERTY keyboard. The alternative encodings provided are ABC, ISC, VNI, and VPS. Among these, ISC is for use with ISC fonts such as Adobe Garamond Vie, while VNI can be used with VNI fonts such as VNI-Times, either in Macintosh or Windows format. The ABC encoding is suitable for typing with ABC fonts such as .VnTime in some Unicode-aware applications. The VPS encoding allows typing with VPS Macintosh fonts such as VPS Times.

In many Mac OS X applications, Vietnamese text can be converted among different encodings via the Services menu. For conversion via the command line, an enhanced Macintosh port of UVConverter 1.1.3b, the universal command-line Vietnamese text encoding converter by Pham Kim Long, is included.

Vietnamese-Telex, Vietnamese-VNI, and Vietnamese-VIQR plug-ins for the Traditional Chinese input method enable typing of Nôm characters.

WP Spotlight Plug-in 1.0.2 for Mac OS X from version 10.4 enables Spotlight search for files created by WordPerfect for the Macintosh from version 2.1, including their contents. This is a Universal binary and has been tested on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. Besides text content in main body, footnotes, and endnotes it indexes:

• the version of the WordPerfect document format (WP Mac 2.1 through 4.0)
• the security method (either “None” or “Password Encrypted”)
• the fonts used in the text (search for “Courier”)
• the languages used in the text (search “en” for English, “de” for German)
• the page height and width in points (search for width > 600 to find US Letter but not A4)
• the number of pages (estimated at 1800 characters per page)

This Perl module for Mac OS X emulates MacPerl::DoAppleScript and other built-in MacPerl functions. It has since been incorporated into the Mac::Carbon module but may still be useful as a pure-Perl alternative.

WP DocCompare is a free addition to Corel WordPerfect for the Macintosh that adds state-of-the-art document comparison functionality. When invoked, it compares the text of the front window to text of the second window and marks any word in either document that differs from corresponding text in the other.

WP DocCompare requires a Macintosh computer with System 7.5 or later, WordPerfect 3.5 or later, and MacPerl. All of the software is freely available; for the latest version of WordPerfect, download the WordPerfect Kit from the WP Mac mailing list archives.

WP DocCompare itself is distributed both as a compiled AppleScript and AppleScript droplet, onto which documents to be compared are dropped.

It is built around a dynamic algorithm that finds a longest common subsequence (LCS) of two sequences. The algorithm since version 2.0 is that described in A fast algorithm for computing longest common subsequences, CACM, vol.20, no.5, pp. 350-353, May 1977, with a few improvements for higher speed. Because WP DocCompare applies the same algorithm first for sentences and then for words, large documents that have at least some sentences in common are processed in a fraction of the time needed for a full-scale calculation. This approach is not guaranteed to lead to an LCS of words but in practice will usually do.

Please download the latest versions of WP DocCompare:

WP_DocCompare_2.1.sit (65 KB)

WP_DocCompare_2.0.1.sit (24 KB)

Mac OS X

WP DocCompare 2.1 is compatible with Mac OS X version 10.1.2 to 10.4.11. On Mac OS X it does not require MacPerl and runs in a separate process outside Classic.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to John Rethorst for the initial idea, encouragement, testing and help with the documentation. WP DocCompare includes parts of the Algorithm::Diff Perl module, started by Mark-Jason Dominus and rewritten by Ned Konz, who adapted the McIlroy-Hunt diff algorithm from Smalltalk code of Mario Wolczko. Thanks to Michel Treisman, Geoff Gilbert, and Duane Small for reporting bugs.

Last updated 27 December 2007

Gero Herrmann