Will MS Word for Mac 2011 Do Arabic and Hebrew?

With the announcement of the Oct. 26 release date and appearance of a MacWorld review, we are wondering whether Word will in fact finally support RTL scripts. This blog entry last month seemed to indicate "no", but the MacWorld reviewer has posted a "yes" for Arabic in the comments section of his own piece.

Some earlier postings based on beta versions seemed to say "yes" or "only for reading".

http://www.apple-wd.com/2010/04/arabic-support-and-msoffice/

http://macbiblioblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/still-no-hebrew-for-word-2011.htm

Update Oct. 15: In response to a question, the MS Office for Mac Team blog owners responded that "Due to technology limitations on the text input tools, Office for Mac’s Unicode support won’t include right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic."

Alternatives for Missing iPad Keyboards

As of 11/1/2010, the iPad app store lists keyboards for Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese, Greek, Korean, Dvorak, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish, Czech, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Icelandic, Finnish, Serbian (Cyr), Serbian (Latin), Catalan, Macedonian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, and Pashto.

Word Web App Does Arabic and Hindi

MS Word for Mac currently cannot do complex scripts such as Arabic or Hindi, and it looks like the next edition, to be released with Office Mac 2011, won't have that capability either. But my initial tests of the Word Web App now available as part of Windows Live Office indicate that these scripts are possible when using this "cloud" version.

A reader with a PC has confirmed that they display correctly when the Word Web app .docx is viewed or downloaded with a Windows machine. Whether such a doc created using a Windows machine will display correctly on a Mac remains to be tested.

There seem to some input problems with Safari when the Alt/Option key is required -- characters may not appear in the text. Firefox works OK, however. Opera does not work at all.

No Language Fixes in Office for Mac 2011?

MS has now released info on the new features expected in Office for Mac 2011 here. It's hard to believe, but there is no indication that the much-requested support for Arabic, Hebrew, and Indic scripts has been included.

Adobe App Language Improvements

Adobe's InDesign and other apps have suffered in the past from various limitations regarding the scripts and languages they can handle, but this situation is being improved via their World-Ready Composer. Some useful info on what can now to done can be found in this article in Thomas Phinney's new blog.

Mellel Expands Language Features

The new 2.6 version of the Mellel word processor adds support for import/export of a number of CJK text encodings and for vowel marks in Windows Hebrew fonts.

Mellel is considered the best OS X word processor for RTL scripts.

iWork 09 Has New Localizations

Apple's latest upgrade of iWork finally has the full set of 18 OS X localizations. Previous versions only had 8. Aside from that, however, I was not able to find any improvements in language capabilities. In particular, longstanding bugs in input/editing of RTL scripts like Arabic and Hebew have not been fixed. The ability to use Windows Arabic fonts, introduced in TextEdit with OS X 10.5, is still absent in these apps. Options for vertical layout and ruby annotation which Japanese/Chinese language users want have not been added. And the strange Unicode input bugs described here remain.

The new iWork requires 10.5.6 or 10.4.11.

Typing Urdu

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and a close relative of Hindi, but written right-to-left with Arabic script rather than left-to-right with Devanagari. A particular challenge in creating Urdu text on the Mac is that the preferred script style is Nastaliq. Unfortunately the only available modern Nastaliq fonts are for Windows, and won't work in OS X apps, except for Mellel, OpenOffice/X11, and Leopard TextEdit.

I don't know Urdu, but I tried several Windows Nastaliq fonts, and the ones that look best to me are Alvi and Nafees. My iDisk has several Urdu keyboard layouts, of which Urdu-Qwerty is probably a good one to try.

Here is an example of a short Urdu text in Mellel, first in standard script and then in Nastaliq:



Comments/corrections welcome as always.

Typing and Reading Syriac

See updated article.

Unicode Bug in Pages

In an earlier article I mentioned some fonts are now available for the new scripts in Unicode 5.1. If you try to use these in Pages (or Keynote or iWeb), you may find that they do not work. For some reason the text engine in these apps does not allow direct input of characters not included in the Unicode version embodied in the OS -- i.e. characters which do not have a name when you select them in the Character Palette.

Strangely, this bug only affects characters in the Unicode BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane) -- direct input of those at U+10000 and up is not a problem.

A workaround is to compose in TextEdit (or another app) and copy/paste into Pages.

Another bug is the apparent inability to input ZWJ and ZWNJ in Pages. These characters are required for correct encoding of some languages using the Arabic, Tamil, and Devanagari scripts.