Wednesday, October 24, 2012

iBookstore Adds Language Support

The latest iTunes Producer Guide, version 2.8, indicates that a number of new languages are now supported by iBooks and the iBookstore using the ePub 3 format.  iBooks 3 and iOS 6 are required.  These are:

Arabic, Burmese, Chinese, Dari, Hebrew, Japanese, Khmer, Kurdish, Lao, Malay, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tajik, Urdu, Uyghur, and Uzbek

(Unfortunately neither Pages nor iBooks Author can do the vertical layout and phonetic guides used in Chinese/Japanese books, and both have bugs with RTL scripts that make them normally unsuitable for Arabic, Dari, Hebrew, Kurdish, Pashto, Persian, Sindhi, Urdu, Uzbek, and Uyghur.

Some info on creating ePub 3 with vertical text is at

http://www.slideshare.net/liz_castro/writing-epub-3-tokyo-ebook-expo

http://epicsword.pixnet.net/blog/post/38345625

2/16/2013:  I have reports that despite what is written in the iTunes Producer Guide, the iBookstore will still not accept books in Arabic and other RTL scripts, even if the stated conditions are met. 

2 comments:

paul hunt said...

Is the Punjabi support for Arabic script (Shahmukhi)? Or for Gurmukhi script?

Tom Gewecke said...

paul -- they haven't said and I don't know for sure, but I suspect it is Arabic script which is new here. Gurmukhi, along with Hindi and other Indic scripts have always been supported as far as I know.