Here’s an oddity: Arabic and Hebrew characters don’t render in the iPhone’s web browser. BBC News, for example, offers news in a variety of different languages, including Arabic. However, when you try to view those pages on the iPhone, the Arabic text renders as gibberish. A quick test of other sites in both Arabic and Hebrew showed that the iPhone’s version of Safari doesn’t render either language correctly.
Safari on OS X (and, presumably, on Windows) handles Arabic and Hebrew just fine, and in fact languages with other alphabets do seem to display correctly on the iPhone’s version of Safari: Chinese and Russian, for example. The problem likely lies in the character encodings supported by the iPhone’s browser: indeed, visiting one site which tests Unicode support for browsers showed that Safari on the iPhone does not recognize any characters from Hebrew or Arabic, though it does recognize most characters from other encodings such as Cyrillic and Japanese.
I presume support for other alphabets will materialize in a future software update, and I’d imagine it’d be necessary before the iPhone can be offered for sale in the Middle East, anyway.
Greek on the other hand seems to render just fine. See, for example this page from the Better Bibles Blog: http://englishbibles.blogspot.com/2007/07/from-sappho-2.html
I am also sure that this will be corrected ASAP by the Apple. Mac Os X is excellent with the Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Japanese. Apple will correct things back to normal.
It actually just does not have the Arabic nor Hebrew Character sets. I think that once they are added, your pages will render just fine. Given the limited storage space of the iPhone and the limited usage of the iPhone in those locals, they decided to leave it off until they deploy iPhones in the middle east.
Eytan said, "Given the limited storage space of the iPhone and the limited usage of the iPhone in those locals, they decided to leave it off until they deploy iPhones in the middle east."
So why do Greek characters render?
unfortunately, that's one of the things I discovered early on about my iphone. I had bbc arabic bookmarked on my safari (OS 10.4) but when those bookmarks synced into iphone's safari, Arabic was rendered into a bunch of symbols. Kinda disappointing but I am sure it will be resolved with future software updates.
I am also disappointed with the lack of Hebrew support on the iPhone. I regularly browse websites that combine English and Hebrew, rendering half the page in gibberish. I hope they include a fix in their first software update.
Chinese web sites render fine and certainly chinese fonts take a lot more space than Greek, Hebrew etc. Maybe the browser does not correctly render right-to-left languages (not sure if what I say makes sense) and they decided to omit the fonts until correctly supported?
Cyrillic pages also render fine which makes me suspicious that the luck of support for semitic languages is not a font/space issue.
Note to R. Mansfield
Greek (as well as Russian) displays perhaps because iPhone is due to be released to European countries this year. Not sure what Apple plans for Middle East release of iPhone--Greece is not a country of the middle east.
Characters unique to Vietnamese don't render either.
"Mac Os X is excellent with the Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Japanese."
Excellent would be something of an exaggeration.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a mac/ubuntu fan myself, but I know that if you want decent RTL/LTR support you need Microsoft. OSX does a lousy job with RTL support, and if it weren't for the Israeli software "Mellel" wordprocessing in RTL languages like Arabic, Hebrew or Farsi would be impossible in OS X.
Not to mention that iPods still don't have Hebrew/Arabic/etc. characters in them either.
Mac OSX is 'ok' with Hebrew. RTL pretty much sucks all around, but the comment about Microsoft is misleading. You mean Windows supports Hebrew perfectly. MS apps on OSX are the worst. The only decent support for Hebrew on a Mac is with NeoOffice. It's slow, but perfect.
And yes, the lack of Hebrew fonts on iPhone is annoying. Apple (and Microsoft for that matter) should take into account that there are about 1 million Hebrew speakers outside Israel, not to mention the millions of Arabic speakers outside the middle east. Language support should be the norm, regardless of where a product will be sold.
There are similar issues in Safari 3 Beta for Windows. The characters for Arabic and Persian display, but they are disjointed.
It's disappointing that after a decade of the Unicode Consortium and other groups pushing for programming for global use that Apple and other companies still commit these otherwise uncommon errors.
Then again this is coming from a company thats best selling product, the iPod, still does not support a single Middle Eastern language (no Arabic, no Persian, no Hebrew, no Urdu). Sad.
The article's terminology is somewhat wrong. The iPhone does not lack general unicode support or have missing "encodings". The problem is that the required fonts have not yet been provided for a number of languages which are available in the full OS X, including Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, and Tamil.
http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2007/06/iphone-language-capabilities-seem.html
It is not MAC way of doing business.
According to the following site. The iPhone has been hacked to support Hebrew
http://www.iphones.co.il/wordPress/
same problem for Farsi :(
There is a solution out right now were you can change the language on your iphone go too. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250169863751. You could see it there I purchased it the other day and it works great. Go check it out right now You could change the Iphone language to
English
Danish
German
French
Korean
Polish
Italian
Portuguese
Japanese
Russian
Spanish
Finnish
Chinese
Swedish
Norwegian
Chinese Traditional
iphone is sold in the middle east now, there should be arabic supported software.
I have been waiting for years for Apple to support Arabic on their iPods. In fact in 2006 there was a seemingly credible news story stating an Arabic iPod would released soon
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/06/01/18/10012373.html
but there's been no news since. What's the hold up Apple? Is Arabic script not sleek enough and conformist enough for you?
I have a good news about Arabic :)
Apple will enable Arabic the next firmware version of iphone (1.1.3 or 1.1.4).
I'm tracking the iphone firmware changes form 1.0.0 and I know that apple doing something regarding Arabic and other languages.
Just matter of the time and you will have Arabic support soon.
Best regards
Ali
I think eBay item that Ali mentioned [Posted by Ali | September 12, 2007 5:59 PM] was a fraud. The item did not specify what was available, and the seller does not sell those anymore.
You can surf using this website :
http://iphone.e-zi.com/isurf/
from your iPhone. it will convert the site that you looking for into utf8. so as long as you have the needed charecters you will be able to watch it.
it's working good for hebrew and arabic.