Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Yosemite Update Fixes Keyboard Layout Switching Bug

Apple released Yosemite 10.10.2 on Jan. 27, which includes the following fix:

+ Addresses an issue that may cause the input method to switch languages unexpectedly

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Languages Not Yet Supported in Apple iBookstore

The iBookstore Formatting Guidelines of September, 2014 lists books in these languages as not yet eligible for distribution:  Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Burmese, Persian/Farsi, Hebrew, Khmer, Lao, Malay (Jawi/Arabic), Sinhala, Tamil, Urdu.

My guess that that Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Persian, Malay, and Urdu are excluded because the iBooks app does not yet support the right-to-left page turning they require.  Burmese and Lao could be because proper line breaking is not possible.

From a separate list of "supported" languages it appears that in addition no books in other Indic scripts are currently accepted -- Devanagari, Gujarati, Bangla, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Telugu.

It's not clear why Indic scripts and Amharic are not accepted.  As far as I know Pages and iBooks Author support composing in them, and the iBooks app can display them OK.

Edit 3/20/15:  I have evidence that at least one Devanagari book has been accepted in the iBookstore.

Edit 12/17:  The 2017 edition of the Formatting Guidelines does not change list of unsupported languages.