iPad Country Releases

Q: In which countries has the iPad been officially released for sale, and when?

A:

April 3: US

May 28: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK

July 23: Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore.

September 17: China, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru

November 30: Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Malaysia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Sweden, and Taiwan

Mobile Safari Displays Embedded Fonts

I just noticed that the Safari on my iPad with iOS 4.2.1 will display embedded .ttf/.otf fonts -- fonts that are not part of iOS but downloadable from a web page. For an example try my Egyptian Test Page.

This is a very important capability, since users are not able to add any fonts to iOS devices.

My iPod Touch, still on iOS 4.0, lacks this feature, so it must be new. Also the new WOFF format, designed to offer greater IP protection, does not work yet.

iPad Language Capabilities Expanded

iOS 4.2 for the iPad was released today and as expected it brings the language capabilities of the iPad up to those available for a while now in the iPhone/iPod Touch, including Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Korean, Traditional Chinese, etc. A full list can be seen in the updated iPad Tech Specs:

http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/

No keyboards are yet available for Indic scripts, even though fonts are present for Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Sinhala. (The full OS X still does not have the last 6 of these.)

For a full list of virtual and hardware keyboard layouts, see

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/ipad4kbs.html

I understand that the Keyboard Dock is available in the following layouts: English, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and French.

MS Office 2011 Language Support

The Help for Office 2011 for Mac provides the following list of supported input keyboards and methods:

"Australian, Austrian, Belgian, Brazilian, British, Bulgarian, Canadian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dvorak, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Inuktitut, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian (F.Y.R.O.), Northern Sami, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss French, Swiss German, Turkish, U.S., Ukrainian, Unicode Hex Input, and Welsh. You can also use the following Mac OS X input methods: Hangul, Kotoeri, Murasu Anjal Tamil, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese."

A list of languages for which proofing tools are available is here.

I am skeptical that Murasu Anjal Tamil will actually work and am seeking confirmation. MS claimed that for Office 2008 as well, and it turned out to be incorrect.

PS For a great analysis by Michael Kaplan of Mac Office 2011 support for Tamil, see this article.