Sunday, August 16, 2015

Word For Mac Now Does Connected Arabic

After applying an update of 8/11/2015, my Word for Mac 2016 suddenly displays connected Arabic script in a new document (not a doc created by Windows Word).  Is this for real?  It's been 14 years folks are waiting.

I'd welcome reports from readers regarding how complete this new support is.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Yes and finally! I was surprised that it does connect correctly. But the RTL function is still missing.

Tom Gewecke said...

What do you mean by the "RTL function"? Having the line start at the right with the cursor always moving left?

Heb user said...

So the script is connected but there's no RTL support? Is this the best they could do? I use Word in Hebrew and the cursor moves in the opposite direction from the arrow key, to get to the beginning of the line you have to click "end of line", numbers and Latin text in the same paragraph are a complete no-no.
Does anyone know when the all-mighty Microsoft are planning to release an RTL compatible version? The most annoying thing is that the iOS Word app works great.

Tom Gewecke said...

Heb User -- some think that MS plans to give Word for Mac 2016 full RTL capability in a future update. I think that is what happened with Word for iOS, the original version did not have it. How soon though nobody can tell you. In the meantime many use the free office clone LibreOffice instead.