Friday, March 6, 2015

MS Word 2016 for OS X Preview: Still No RTL Support, but Indic Yes

I did a quick test with the preview of the new Word 2016 for Mac which was released by Microsoft March 6.   Arabic input was not connected and the characters ran in the wrong direction.  So it looks like the long-requested support for RTL text is still missing.

On the other hand, support for Indic scripts looks much improved:  Hindi conjuncts and vowel reordering were displayed correctly, which has not been the case in earlier versions.

Comments from readers who are able to give this app more thorough tests would be most welcome.

4 comments:

Muthu said...

Tom, I tried Tamil, both with my own Input Method as well as the one built into Mac OS. It does not work at all. It's even worst than Office 2011 as it crashes at the first letter I type. Also tried Malayalam - same thing. Crashes at the first key. I'm able to type Devanagari but the conjuncts are not forming.

Tom Gewecke said...

Thanks, Muthu! Did you try the Apple Kohinoor font with Devanagari? Conjuncts seem to work for me at least sometimes with that one.

Unknown said...

whenever i m typing any bangla word using unicode software,in MS word 2016 all words are disappearing

Tom Gewecke said...

Ishtiaq -- thanks for the info! I think only Devanagari may work at present.