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."

Fonts That Expand Word 2008 Language Capabilities

MS Word is normally unable to handle Arabic, Hebrew, plus Indic and other complex scripts. But XenoTypeTech has found that with certain fonts Word 2008 for Mac can be used for Tibetan, Khmer, Tai Le, Kannada, and Malayalam. See this page for info.

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.

New Khmer Font for OS X

Thanks to Danh Hong a new font for reading/writing Khmer script in OS X is available hereor here. You can find related info in my earlier article.

I encourage readers to give the new font a try and let us know if you find any issues. I'm told it will also work right in Word 2008 for Mac if you set the 'enable all ligatures' option under Format/Font/Advanced.