Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Will MS Word for Mac 2011 Do Arabic and Hebrew?

With the announcement of the Oct. 26 release date and appearance of a MacWorld review, we are wondering whether Word will in fact finally support RTL scripts. This blog entry last month seemed to indicate "no", but the MacWorld reviewer has posted a "yes" for Arabic in the comments section of his own piece.

Some earlier postings based on beta versions seemed to say "yes" or "only for reading".

http://www.apple-wd.com/2010/04/arabic-support-and-msoffice/

http://macbiblioblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/still-no-hebrew-for-word-2011.htm

Update Oct. 15: In response to a question, the MS Office for Mac Team blog owners responded that "Due to technology limitations on the text input tools, Office for Mac’s Unicode support won’t include right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic."

2 comments:

Joaquin said...

I personally tried this out in the Apple Store, and as expected Arabic and Persian scripts are not supported. The letters will not be joined.

Anonymous said...

However, when opening a Hebrew document that was created on windows, I can edit it and the text flows from right to left.
It is still not perfect in treatment of text movement etc. but is a perfectly working work-around.

So, all one has to do is have ONE old Hebrew/Arabic/Farsi document that flows from right to left.
Open and Save-as functionalities then are sufficient.

Enjoy!