Monday, February 22, 2010

Fonts That Expand Word 2008 Language Capabilities

MS Word is normally unable to handle Arabic, Hebrew, plus Indic and other complex scripts. But XenoTypeTech has found that with certain fonts Word 2008 for Mac can be used for Tibetan, Khmer, Tai Le, Kannada, and Malayalam. See this page for info.

4 comments:

Chris Thompson said...

Interesting - couldn't get it to work with Devanagari (Mangal OpenType font) or Bengali (Bengali Unicode OpenType font).

for both, typing "ki" still came out in that order even with ligatures on in the Format...Font dialog box. Those characters should re-order so that the "i" character comes before the "k"

Tom Gewecke said...

Chris -- I think it only works with the scripts listed, which probably do not require any reordering, and only with Xenotype's own fonts.

Were you able to get Word to show correct Tibetan? A test page is here:

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/ltp.html

Anonymous said...

Aha, I was wondering what the difference would be.
Further to the Mangal/Devanagari test, Word doesn't join conjuncts even with that "ligatures" setting on. For example, "k-halant-s" should form a conjunct letter, but doesn't in Word 2008. It just places a halant sign after the k and before the s.
Couldn't do Tibetan, as I've no font for that.

Oh well, back to TextEdit.

Regards, Chris Thompson.

Tom Gewecke said...

If you want to test Tibetan in Word, this is the place to get a typical Windows font:

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Tibetan.html