Mac Office 2004 is approaching RTM

The press release has gone out. Unless some horrible bug is found in the next couple of weeks, Mac Office 2004 should be out in May. Rick Schaut posts about some of the work done in Word 2004. As he mentions, Entourage 2004 does support have some support for right-to-left languages (I did the Unicode work), but, as he mentions, this was a lot easier in Entourage than it would be for Word. Basically, Entourage can use Apple's high level ATSUI APIs to do the text layout while Word has its own layout engine that's more advanced than ATSUI. There are also likely to be plenty of bugs in the Entourage right-to-left support, since it hasn't been heavily tested.