Sharing Multilingual Documents Localized versions of Office 95 and earlier were based on character encoding standards that varied from one script to another. When users working in one language version of Office exchanged documents with a user who worked in another language version of Office, text was often garbled because of the difference between character encodings. Therefore, users opening Office 2000 documents in a localized version of Office 95 or earlier might encounter some limitations in the languages that they can display. However, Office 2000 is based on an international character encoding standard Unicode that allows users upgrading to Office 2000 to more easily share documents across languages.
Multilingual documents can contain text in languages that require different scripts .
A single script can be used to represent many languages. The Latin script has glyphs to represent all of the characters in most European languages and a few others. Some Asian languages use ideographic scripts that have glyphs based on Chinese characters. Other languages, such as Thai and Arabic, use complex scripts , which have glyphs that are composed of several smaller glyphs or glyphs that must be shaped differently depending on adjacent characters. A common way to store text is to represent each character by using a single byte.