To be ensured full-scale support of Cyrillic alphabet in the scope of application of this standard.
General
Proposed Disposition of DIS 29500 Comment BG-0003 (Modified: 2007-12-07) We agreed that it is an important goal of the specification to be compatible with all known alphabet forms and languages currently in use. It is important to note that Office Open XML is fundamentally an application of XML, and, as such, it is an intentional requirement that the ability to represent text in Cyrillic or other alphabets is not constrained beyond what XML specifies. The XML 1.0 Recommendation allows for any character encoded in current versions of the ISO/IEC 10646 standard. The relevant text from XML 1.0 follows: [Definition: A parsed entity contains text, a sequence of characters , which may represent markup or character data.] [Definition: A character is an atomic unit of text as specified by ISO/IEC 10646 [ISO/IEC 10646] . Legal characters are tab, carriage return, line feed, and the legal characters of Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646. The versions of these standards cited in A.1 Normative References were current at the time this document was prepared. New characters may be added to these standards by amendments or new editions. Consequently, XML processors MUST accept any character in the range specified for Char .] This ensures that all locations where user text is stored shall be capable of storing characters from the Cyrillic alphabet. It is also important to note that the specification will also be changing to reference the widely accepted standard BCP 47 for language tags, in order to ensure the widest possible language support within Office Open XML.
