How good is foreign language support of MB and MBP?

I wonder how good is the Apple O. / S. in supporting foreign languages (and I don’t mean European characters but things like Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hebrew)?

Anyone here using any of these languages? How does it fair for you? Are the features and fonts built-in or would I need to get a special version of the O. / S.? Either way, how stable is it?

Thanks for any replies.

 

Foreign language support in OS X is excellent, and it includes language kits, etc. for Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, etc. You can choose to install additional languages, etc. when you install OS X. OS X has full support built in for handling these languages and choosing how they are formatted, etc.

I found this on google..... should give you a good idea of what the capabilities are (this is an example of setting up Farsi in OS X):

http://www.hoomanb.com/Unicode/MacOSX.htm

 

You also might be interesting in some third party software like Mellel, which includes support for many of these languages (specifically, that it handles things like bi-directionality, etc. which are vital to actually take advantage of this kind of language support):

http://www.redlers.com/mellelmultilingual.html

 

Yeah I was surprised to see the fonts I had such as Japanese (which never worked right on windows) as well as many others. OS X does a wonderful job at it.

 

Great to hear this, as I have a lot of emails and files that are in various languages and though I can't read them (limited IQ) I still need to keep a copy of them and be able to open them.

Thanks for the replies.

 

I find it really nice that OS X comes with foreign language support in the default install. I just started learning Mandarin Chinese, and it's great that the fonts were already on my system. I have one older Toshiba laptop running XP SP2 that doesn't have the Chinese fonts (you have to specifically check the "far east support" or whatever when you install from the XP CD-ROM), and it's a pain in the rear. I have to find my XP CD-ROM (it's in a drawer somewhere around here) to be able to get Chinese fonts working.

 

我也觉得windows的汉字用法非常不好的!!

Yeah, working with other languages in windows is THE pain in the bum. I love how OS X just...works with them.

 

The best part is oinkcluckmoobahh, that all the windows users here probably just saw you say a bunch of gibberish and the mac users here saw what you said.

Its secret code.

 

LOL! that is funny!

I do have a complaint, well my wife does. Their Portuguese is Brazilian Portuguese not Portuguese Portuguese. Kind of frustrating.

 

Ok, care to give us (those in the migratory period) what that "oink..." really means? Please!

 

hi

i can read and write in arabic in mac os x

i do not have any proplem there

 

Is there definitely not an option? I know I've at least seen third party apps for OS X which mentioned both Portuguese and Portuguese (Brazilian). I thought I had seen both options somewhere in the language support as well.

 

I'm sure some people will find having extra font is annoying and a waste of space on their system (and by all means if you do just remove them, its not that hard) but I enjoy having various languages. I don't think everyone of them is installed right away? I never checked.

I go to a lot of japanese sites often and its nice for once not to have to mess around trying to get the japanese font to work, because it works right away. I can't read it lol but thats not the point I'm making, but it increases my exposure to other cultures/languages.