Thursday, March 27, 2014

MS Word For iPad: No Support For Arabic Or Indic

My initial tests indicate that the Word for iPad app released today cannot do RTL (like Arabic -- wrong direction and letters not connected) or Indic scripts (like Devanagari -- no conjuncts or vowel reordering).

Like Mac Word, iPad Word can be made to add correct Arabic to an Arabic document created by Windows Word, which may be a useful in some circumstances.

1 comment:

Muthu said...

Tom, I played with the iPhone version and I was able to type in Tamil. Tamil has no conjuncts but re-ordering and insertions work fine. The only thing bad is it uses it's own Latha font which is rather ugly!

Font choices are limited and no Indic fonts appear in the list. They should have included at least Arial Unicode MS which has better glyphs for Tamil then Latha.

I guess the system fonts in iOS are out of the question because they do not include OpenType tables.