New Language Features in Windows 7

MS has announced that Windows 7 will be released in October. This blog article gives info on some of its improvements in the area of internationalization. Notable are a large number of new fonts and some 38 OS localizations.

This page lists the 150+ keyboard layouts apparently available.

OS X 10.6 is apparently staying with the 18 localizations available in 10.5.

New Nastaliq Font For Pro Arabic Script Apps

In an earlier article we provided information on the limited possibilities for displaying Nastaliq-style script in OS X. Recently DecoType, which produces software for top-end Arabic script typography, has released a new font for doing Nastaliq with WinSoft's Tasmeem plug-in for Adobe InDesign ME. Further info can be found here.

Typing Khmer

Khmer is the official language of Cambodia. Currently the only way to read or type this script correctly on a Mac is to acquire the Xenotypetech Language Kit.

Free Khmer fonts for Windows are available here, but various characters will not display properly in OS X. For a free keyboard layout to use with these, download and install NiDA_Khmer_Mac.1.0.keylayout from this site.

If you have a copy of OpenOffice 2.3/2.4 (the one that used X11, not version 3.0), I think windows Khmer fonts may display correctly in that app.