We love discovering and hearing about all of the little gems in Apple’s latest developer release of Mac OS 10.7 Lion. This latest nugget comes to use from AppleInsider, and involved the TextEdit app gaining more features and functionality.
Proving that Apple seems to be paying attention to every detail in their upcoming release of OS X Lion, they have given some love to their built-in TextEdit app, adding support for vertical text layouts for certain Asian languages, as well as a dedicated graphical menu bar with font selection and highloghting.
It also takes advantage of Apple’s automatic file saving technologies in OS X 10.7, which effectively replaces the App’s simple autosave feature.
The version number has changed from 1.6 in Snow Leopard up to version 1.7 in Lion, due to the number of enhancements, and how they significantly change and improve the app.
For users typing in a language that supports vertical text layout, such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, a new option enables vertical text layout. While Roman characters are simply printed sideways in vertical layouts, certain East Asian scripts print their ideograms in a stack vertically, which is supported in Mac OS X’s underlying Core Text API and exposed for use in Lion’s new TextEdit.
It’s important, however, to note, that when the app is put into vertical text layout, Roman characters are printed sideways while the Japanese glyphs are stacked vertically on top of each other (below).
Just another neat new “little thing” that Apple will potentially be bringing to the masses this summer with OS X 10.7 Lion.
Images, original story via AppleInsider
