Apple has announced that the next version of OS X, 10.6 Snow Leopard, will be available in September, and posted its tech specs. As far as I can tell from what has been released, 10.6 will have no new language localizations (I would have expected perhaps at least Arabic) and the only expansion in language input capability may be Chinese handwriting for machines with a multitouch trackpad.
Under Key Technologies the specs say "Unicode 4". Hopefully this is a typo, since Unicode 5 has been available since 2007.
The Accessiblity page indicates that VoiceOver will be able to do all 18 system languages, but the extra voices will have to be purchased separately.
PS (6/17): I see the specs have been updated to say Unicode 5.1.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Looks like they may be fixing the screwy, inconsistent right-to-left text stuff (that, e.g., works well in TextEdit, not so much in Pages):
Bidirectional text.
For languages that are written right to left, such as Hebrew and Arabic, Snow Leopard now elegantly handles mixing in left-to-right text. It also has a split-cursor option that shows the appropriate cursor direction at the boundary between right-to-left and left-to-right text.
From here.
Thanks! I have doubts that will fix Pages, but we can hope so.
Looks like they fixed the Unicode version typo. Now it says 5.1.
I am hoping 10.6 will finally provide full OpenType support, so that we will be able to use the many Windows/Linux-type fonts for complex scripts like Devanagari -- for which now only the Devanagari MT font included in OS X is usable.
Me too, Andrew, but so far I have not seen anything that would indicate we will get this.
Post a Comment