Friday, July 19, 2013

iWork for iCloud Beta: No RTL or Indic Support

Apple has released the public beta of its new iWork for iCloud, which provides a web version of Pages and other iWork apps.   My initial tests with Pages indicate that support for Arabic/Hebrew and Indic scripts is totally broken, though I haven't found any mention of that in the support documentation.

I'm not aware of any other Apple product which so completely fails to serve those language communities of about 1 billion people.  Hopefully it will be fixed in future upgrades (though that is not on the list in the "coming soon" features.)