“Many languages that worked flawlessly in Panther do not work in Tiger, due to an ill-conceived attempt at better cross-platform font support. For the first time in a decade, Windows is actually ahead of the Mac in supporting complex typography and Asian languages.”
Thanks for this article. I switched to the Mac about 10 years ago BECAUSE of the advanced typographical abilities. It’s really too bad that Apple is succumbing to the “It’s a Window’s world” phenomena, and replacing it’s superior technology with the univerally mediocre Microsoft stuff.
I don’t know that I’d call Windows “ahead” just because they currently have better support for a crappy standard than Apple’s first attempt. Apple’s mistake was releasing long before they were ready.
I also don’t know whether it’s clueless management or economic necessity, but Apple has longstanding problems with this kind of thing.
Granted, QuickDraw3D never really took off, but they dumped it for OpenGL, which isn’t even remotely the same thing. Likewise all the other once-hyped technologies that died suddenly or were replaced by (usually inferior) “standards”: OpenDoc, Dylan, Open Transport…. Hopefully they won’t decide to further “improve their user experience” by dropping OpenGL in favor of (yech) DirectX.
When major shifts happen, it always seems to be in haste and without much QA. Decisions like that smell like management decrees that all new development must embrace this or that buzzword. The jury is still out on Intel Mac’s, though they seem to have had some development effort prior to the announcement.
“though they seem to have had some development effort prior to the announcement”..
They [Apple] have had every version of OS X running on Intel based systems. It’s not a new thing.
Has Apple ceased support for its TrueType fonts? If not, why is this guy complaining? Just don’t use OpenType fonts on the Mac (which you couldn’t do before, anyway).
Correct me if I’m wrong.
Everything breaks in Tiger as far as Korean support goes. Appe so-called supports Unicode? They don’t even have Unicode Korean fonts. In Tiger, even entering Korean in some spots becomes cut-and-paste job.
Not to mention the almost next to impossible to read legibility of Korean font.
I am on Windows XP, and I am in heaven.
I don’t see where the author says MS is ahead of Apple, indeed he seems to be saying the opposite : ” Take Tibetan or Burmese for example, these have been possible for years on a Macintosh, but still have yet to be officially adopted by Microsoft. Even the upcoming release of Longhorn is unlikely to support Burmese.”
Also the submitter lost an opprtunity here to submit the story as “the cunning linguist” 😉
…but Apple could be _way_ farther ahead, and easily at that. This sounds to me like a really stupid bug that nobody at Apple cares about. I have heard similar reports for a long time now (always about Apple font extensions being ignored in favour of other, weaker extensions), and it seems to get worse with every version of OS X. This is an issue that really should be fixed, but I do not even have enough understanding to even file a bug report.
I hope the writer of the article filed one, but there’s no mention of a radar number.
“Unicode support Mac OS X Tiger supports the latest version of the Unicode standard, version 4.0.1, published in March 2004. Unicode 4.0.1 extends the character repertoire to encode more than 96,000 characters. The character repertoires of Unicode 4.0.1 and International Standard ISO/IEC 10646 are fully synchronized. ”
Since 4.1 is still realtively new on the sceen might we see and update to the statndard in 10.4.3.
As for the three OSs I use regualarly I would say the OS X handles East Asian characters the best by far. When you do Japanese all day long and English all night without a hitch and done easily I can’t realy complain.
I know that Japanese support in Tiger/panther or earlier even OS X beta was very very good. Entering texts no problem, all their fontt Unicode compliant, and man, Japanese fonts looks gorgeous.
Entering Korean support. Man. The exactly opposite is happening. There are many countries in East Asia.
Japanese is the only one in there Apple is putting their effort in.
My wife uses Korean when sending e-mail in Tiger, I just asked her and she has no problems with it.