New Reference on Working with Classical Languages

David Perry has recently completed the 2nd Edition of his excellent "Document Preparation for Classical Languages," which covers such topics as Unicode, smart font technology, and how to choose typefaces and editing tools, with special reference to Classical, Biblical, and Medieval Studies and Linguistics. For more info go to

http://scholarsfonts.net/docproc.html

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.

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.