Which languages do Pages and Mac OS X support?

Pages has full support for most major languages in the world, including Chinese and Japanese.

Pages does not support right to left writing, like in Arabic and Hebrew. Neither do MS Word 2004 or MS Word 2008 for Macintosh.

Pages also sometimes has problems with contextual forms in non-Latin languages - especially with OpenType fonts.

For certain languages, like Burmese, Pages does not have full support. Some characters, like ႏ, cannot be displayed for some reason.

Pages does not support vertical writing, so Chinese and Japanese have to be written horizontally. OpenOffice and the English and Japanese versions of MS Word 2004 and MS Word 2008 support vertical text. There was a discussion about this limitation in Pages on Japanese Slashdot in August 2007.

Pages does not support ruby/phonetic guides/furigana/振り仮名 [ふりがな]. OpenOffice and the English and Japanese versions of MS Word 2004 and MS Word 2008 support it, but their implementation is not very elegant. The Japanese version of Adobe InDesign also handles Japanese features. A Western version of InDesign is able to display them but not to modify them.

The following applications have Japanese language features, but they save them in a non-standard format, which makes it difficult to exchange documents with other users: LightWayText, iText, iText Pro. The web pages are in Japanese, but some of those applications also have an English user interface.

There are some scripts that Mac OS X supports, even thought fonts and keyboards are not available by default. For example:

• Bengali/Bangla - free fonts and keyboard available from ekushey.org.
• Kannada - free fonts and keyboard available from nickshanks.com.
• Telugu - free font available from nickshanks.com. Keyboard is available from doe.carleton.ca
• Malayalam - free font available from malayalamlinux. It seems the rendering is not good, however. When you combine the characters ക and െ, the characters should basically switch place, but they do not.
• Sinhala - free font available from nickshanks.com.
• Amharic (and Tigrinya) - several links to free fonts at Ethiopian News Headlines, for example senamirmir

Mac OS X 10.5 does not have sufficient support for Lao, Khmer, Burmese or the Indian language Oriya. Neither does it have support for Nastaʿlīq script, which commonly is used to render Urdu. (This means that there are more than 100 million people who currently are unable to write their own language on a Mac, not counting the 150 million Urdu speakers, who can use standard Arabic script, if they have to.)

For more information about typing in foreign languages check this page.

For more information about using foreign languages on a mac check following resources:

• Unleash Your Multilingual Mac (maintained by Tom Gewecke)
• Multilingual Mac blog (also maintained by Tom Gewecke)
• Chinese Mac (maintained by Eric Rasmussen)
• Chinese Mac newsgroup
• Japanese Pages/iWork discussion forum
• Wikipedia help for Indic scripts