Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Mac Office 2008: Still No Arabic/Hebrew Support
MS Office for Mac 2008 was released Jan. 15, and info on its language capabilities is now available here. Notable is a) the continuing lack of ability to work with Arabic/Hebrew, and b) the presence of Tamil on the list of supported languages. First reports I have indicate that Word 2008 cannot in fact do Tamil (the font is not recognized and you just see squares). One source says the other parts of Office do display it. There are also reports that both PowerPoint and Entourage can do Arabic/Hebrew.
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11 comments:
I can't believe it?!?! Then again, I can. I remember seeing an interview with an Office for Mac representative who said that they planned right-to-left scripting in the next release. Bummer. I prefer to use Pages and Mellel over Office. Howerver, when I'm interacting with people who speak in languages that use right-to-left and use Windows and Office. It would really help to have Mac Office support it.
But Pages is not exactly user friendly with Arabic text :) Pity.
I just find it very strange that when others can support Arabic Microsoft cannot.
Atrocious! Why is this feature continually ignored in the Mac version when the Windows version does it so nicely?...cjb
It may be more difficult than one would think to support right-to-left in Word for Mac.
They have to support the same file format as Word for Windows. And it is possible that the file format for Word for Windows uses features of Windows, that are not available in Mac OS.
Then they would have to re-code Windows system calls in Mac OS, and that may be very difficult.
That's just a guess of course, but it would at least explain why, after all these years, they have not done it.
This is depressing. I'm in the process of learning Arabic and have started typing homework assignments and this inability to type Arabic in Word on Mac is a real detriment. I've been using Mellel, and I have a question for folks here- How do you get punctuation to actually go at the end of a sentence? Every time I type any punctuation it zips back to the right...
Thanks.
DebbieK
For Mellel questions, best to ask in the Mellel forum:
http://forum.redlers.com
Use Neooffice it even have spell checking for hebrew and it works very nicely in terms of MS compatibility.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/feb10/02-11msmacworld2010pr.mspx
office 2011 ... nothing about Arabic/Hebrew
Why there are no forums for Microsoft where we can post our comments and inform them with that problem?
GUC -- See here:
http://www.officeformac.com/ProductForums/
http://www.officeformac.com/blog/
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