iPhone 3GS Has Multilingual Voice Control

According to the info on Apple's website, the new Voice Control feature available in the iPhone 3GS can handle 21 languages, including 3 varieties of Chinese, and 2 each of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Multilingual Voice Over, where the iPhone can speak song titles and artists's names, is also available in 24 languages, as listed here.

Typing Tajik

Tajik is a variety of Farsi/Persian spoken primarily in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, but also Iran and Afghanistan. In the former two countries, it uses the Cyrillic alphabet with 6 characters beyond those found in Russian. OS X includes the fonts necessary for this language.

You can get experimental Cyrillic Tajik keyboard layouts here. The QWERTY version has a graphic to show the character location. The PC version has the special Tajik characters on the Alt/Option layer of the normal Russian keys. Leave a comment if you find errors or think improvements are desirable.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Specs Released

Apple has announced that the next version of OS X, 10.6 Snow Leopard, will be available in September, and posted its tech specs. As far as I can tell from what has been released, 10.6 will have no new language localizations (I would have expected perhaps at least Arabic) and the only expansion in language input capability may be Chinese handwriting for machines with a multitouch trackpad.

Under Key Technologies the specs say "Unicode 4". Hopefully this is a typo, since Unicode 5 has been available since 2007.

The Accessiblity page indicates that VoiceOver will be able to do all 18 system languages, but the extra voices will have to be purchased separately.

PS (6/17): I see the specs have been updated to say Unicode 5.1.

New Stuff in Unicode 5.2

For those interested in the evolution of Unicode, reliable info on what will be included in Version 5.2 (probably being finalized and released around October) is now available. New scripts are Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Avestan, Tai Tham, Tai Viet, Bamum, Imperial Aramaic, Inscriptional Pahlavi, Inscriptional Parthian, Javanese, Kaithi, Lisu, Meetei Mayek, Old South Arabian, Old Turkic, and Samaritan.

For more details, see Andrew West's excellent article.

Of course we are still a long way from having fonts available that incorporate this Unicode update.

Another Chinese Encoding Puzzle

Someone on the Unicode list had a text where strange escape codes had replaced accented chracters. For example the word "clichés" was printed as clich\x{5ee5}. The escape code presumably represents Unicode U+5EE5 or 廥. How could that happen? It turns out that this character has the code E973 in Big5, and that E9 73 in Latin-1 is és. So somehow a Latin-1 text was read as Traditional Chinese in Big5, then read again as Unicode and the non-Latin bits converted to escape sequences.

To make such a text readible, one can convert the the \x{abcd} escapes to the ꯍ html format, view the text with a browser, copy/paste to a text doc, save as Big5, and open as Latin-1.

iPhone 3.0 Software Adds Languages

In today's presention regarding the next version of iPhone software, which is supposed to be released sometime this summer, Apple indicated that it will include new languages and keyboards.

Unfortunately I have not found any info yet about which ones (though I would expect at least Arabic/Hebrew, Greek, and Thai might be among them). If anyone has details, let me know.

PS As of 3/25 I have seen online photos or other reports indicating new keyboards are available for Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Malay, and Thai.

PSS Apple issued the tech specs for the iPhone with 3.0 software on 6/8/2009. It confirms UI, keyboard, and predictive dictionaries for Arabic, Thai, Greek, and Hebrew.

PSSS When made available 6/18/09, 3.0 has off/on switches for two keyboards not mentioned in the tech specs, Bulgarian and Macedonian. But these keyboards do not work.

New Scottish Gaelic Spellcheckers

Thanks to Sealgar IT, users of Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) can obtain new spellchecking dictionaries for this language for use with CocoAspell and with OpenOffice 3 from this page.

New iPod Speaks 14 Languages

The new iPod Shuffle has a "Voiceover" feature which can speak song titles and artists names in English, Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Czech, German, Japanese, Spanish, Dutch, Greek, Polish, and Swedish.

http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/voiceover.html

Hopefully this will find its way into future versions of OS X (where Voiceover is currently only English, unless you purchase additional 3rd party voices).

Montenegrin Keyboard

Montenegro became independent of Serbia in 2006. For those who might want to use Apple's Latin and Cyrillic Serbian keyboard layouts with the Montenegrin flag showing in the Finder, the files for this can be downloaded here. For information on the status of Montenegrin as a language, see this article.

Endangered Languages

UNESCO has just announced the publication of a new edition of its Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. For the first time this has been put on the internet as an interactive web page. You can check it out here.

New Syriac Font for OS X

An earlier article provided some info on typing and reading Syriac. Thanks to XenoTypeTech, there is now a Syriac Font which will work correctly in OS X apps other than Mellel.

Adobe App Language Improvements

Adobe's InDesign and other apps have suffered in the past from various limitations regarding the scripts and languages they can handle, but this situation is being improved via their World-Ready Composer. Some useful info on what can now to done can be found in this article in Thomas Phinney's new blog.

Typing Chemical Drawings

An earlier article provided some info on inputting mathematical equations. Similar issues arise when you need to input drawings of chemical structures, which use their own special "language". The basic approach is to use a separate app and then copy/paste the results as an image or pdf into your document. Links to the main OS X tools are below. I think the first two should be free. This page gives some useful general info on the topic.

BKChem

Marvin

MolWorks

ChemDraw

ChemDoodle

Chem 4-D Draw

Apple US Offering Non-English Keyboards

I'm not sure when they started doing it, but the online AppleStore now offers a choice of physical keyboards with most Macs: English, Western Spanish, French, and Japanese. Earlier you had to buy your machine in another country to get a non-English keyboard.

Mellel Expands Language Features

The new 2.6 version of the Mellel word processor adds support for import/export of a number of CJK text encodings and for vowel marks in Windows Hebrew fonts.

Mellel is considered the best OS X word processor for RTL scripts.

New CJKV Reference Book

Those interested in some of the nitty-gritty for doing Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese on the computer will want to check out the newly-published 2nd edition of CJKV Information Processing by Ken Lunde, Adobe's senior expert on this topic.

I got a copy and think it is a very valuable reference, with tons of stuff that is hard or impossible to find elsewhere. The chapters on input methods, typography, and gaiji were especially useful to fill gaps in my own understanding.

Nisus Writer: Interesting Language Features

Users sometimes complain in the Apple Discussions about the problems that can arise in coordinating the selection of keyboard layouts, fonts, and spell checking when doing multilingual work in OS X. Anyone in this situation may wish to have a look at Nisus Writer Express or Pro (trial downloads available).

The Nisus apps have preference settings where you can determine the keyboard layout, font, and spell checker for any "language" you select from the list produced by clicking on the toolbar Language icon or the Format > Language menu. Plus you can define custom "languages" and also set a keyboard shortcut to activate any individual language on your list.

I haven't myself come across any other word processor with such flexibility in this area. If readers know of one, post a comment.

iWork 09 Has New Localizations

Apple's latest upgrade of iWork finally has the full set of 18 OS X localizations. Previous versions only had 8. Aside from that, however, I was not able to find any improvements in language capabilities. In particular, longstanding bugs in input/editing of RTL scripts like Arabic and Hebew have not been fixed. The ability to use Windows Arabic fonts, introduced in TextEdit with OS X 10.5, is still absent in these apps. Options for vertical layout and ruby annotation which Japanese/Chinese language users want have not been added. And the strange Unicode input bugs described here remain.

The new iWork requires 10.5.6 or 10.4.11.

New Lao Font for OS X

Thanks to John Durdin a new free Lao font is now available. Saysettha MX, which includes Regular, Bold, Oblique, and Bold Oblique versions, is an OpenType font designed especially for optimal display in OS X apps. For full info and links to download the font and a keyboard layout, go to the OS X Section of John's Laoscript site.

Typing Equations and Formulas

While not exactly a "language," the special characters and formatting needed to input mathematical and other equations and formulas can present challenges at least as difficult as a complex Unicode script. Often the only way to get satisfactory display is to compose the equation in a special editor and then save it as pdf and paste into your word processor. Here are some examples of such editors that can be used with OS X:

+Grapher (in Applications/Utilities, Window > Show Equation Palette)

+AppleWorks (if you have it -- Edit/Insert Equation)

+OpenOffice/Formula

+MathType (30 days free trial, then becomes "Lite" version)

+Online LaTex (Use FireFox)

+MathMagic (30 days free trial)

Typing Urdu

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and a close relative of Hindi, but written right-to-left with Arabic script rather than left-to-right with Devanagari. A particular challenge in creating Urdu text on the Mac is that the preferred script style is Nastaliq. Unfortunately the only available modern Nastaliq fonts are for Windows, and won't work in OS X apps, except for Mellel, OpenOffice/X11, and Leopard TextEdit.

I don't know Urdu, but I tried several Windows Nastaliq fonts, and the ones that look best to me are Alvi and Nafees. My iDisk has several Urdu keyboard layouts, of which Urdu-Qwerty is probably a good one to try.

Here is an example of a short Urdu text in Mellel, first in standard script and then in Nastaliq:



Comments/corrections welcome as always.

New iPod Song Languages

The most recent standard iPod's have apparently added some language capabilities for song information display. According to their tech specs, the iPod Classic now has Vietnamese, while the iPod Nano has both Vietnamese and Thai.

Typing and Reading Syriac

Syriac, a major literary language in the Middle East from the 4th to 8th centuries, is not yet included in OS X. In order to read Unicode text in this script you will need to install one of the Meltho fonts from this page or Code2000. Another source for fonts is BethMardutho. To input Syriac you need to install one of the keyboard layouts linked to here.

For correct display of Syriac you have to use Mellel, as the available OpenType fonts are not yet supported by other OS X apps.

Here is a test page using the Lord's Prayer. And here is a graphic version of the same text.

XenoTypeTech says it is working on a Syriac font for OS X.

Character Palette Unicode Versions

You may have noticed that OS X's Character Palette can be out-of-date regarding the script and character names in the latest version of Unicode. That's because Apple apparently only updates this data in the named OS X releases. The last updates of Tiger, from 2007, still use the data from Unicode 4.0 of 2003. The most recent update of Leopard, from September 2008, has data from Unicode 5.0 of mid-2006.

This does not matter much in practical terms, however. Both Tiger and Leopard, with appropriate fonts installed, seem able to input and display all scripts and characters included in Unicode 5.1 of April, 2008.

Unicode Bug in Pages

In an earlier article I mentioned some fonts are now available for the new scripts in Unicode 5.1. If you try to use these in Pages (or Keynote or iWeb), you may find that they do not work. For some reason the text engine in these apps does not allow direct input of characters not included in the Unicode version embodied in the OS -- i.e. characters which do not have a name when you select them in the Character Palette.

Strangely, this bug only affects characters in the Unicode BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane) -- direct input of those at U+10000 and up is not a problem.

A workaround is to compose in TextEdit (or another app) and copy/paste into Pages.

Another bug is the apparent inability to input ZWJ and ZWNJ in Pages. These characters are required for correct encoding of some languages using the Arabic, Tamil, and Devanagari scripts.

Arabic Transcription Tools

I have come across a site with excellent resources for those engaged in Arabic transcription. Although it is in German you should have no difficulty seeing how to download various fonts and the Orientalist Keyboard Layout. The latter is designed to facilitate typing Arabic Latin transcription in both the English and DMG conventions.

Bug in iPhone/iPod Chinese Handwriting Input

The Chinese handwriting input on the latest iPhone/iPod Touch is a pretty impressive feature. But when using the Simplified Chinese version of this, you may find that only 4 character choices are given, so that if none is correct you have to start over. If you switch to the Traditional Chinese version, you will find a button over at the left which says 其他. Tapping this will give you additional sets of 4 choices, where you will probably find the correct one.

The lack of the 其他 button for Simplified Chinese is presumably a bug which Apple will need to fix.

An Interesting Virtual Keyboard

While Apple's Keyboard Viewer can be quite useful, it lacks some capabilities one expects in a true virtual keyboard, since clicking the mouse on Shift, Option/Alt, and other modifier keys does not have any effect on input -- to create uppercase or accented characters you still need to use the physical keyboard. 3rd party alternatives have been very costly, but I recently found a cheaper one which may meet the needs of some people: VirtualKeyboard

Among other features, this keyboard can be varied in size and transparency, and can also be used with at least some non-US keyboard layouts.

The Case of the Bogus Chinese

Recently in the Apple forums someone had a problem with his normal English text turning into Chinese when he applied QuickTime's Export > Text to Text > Text with Descriptors function. Examination of the output file showed the encoding was marked as 256, which means UTF-16, even though the text itself was just ASCII. So for example the two characters "th", with byte values 74 68, were being read as a single two-byte character 7468, or 瑨.

From my testing it appears that when the input text is UTF-16, QT retains this in the Descriptors, but converts the text itself to ASCII. Must be a bug.

Arabic Localization of OS X

I've just recently come across this report providing links to a source (Arab Business Machine Ltd) for Arabic localization files for OS X 10.4.10 and 10.5.2. If anyone has tried these out, I'd be grateful for any comments. It looks like iLife 08 in Arabic is available from ABM as well.

Babylon Translation Software Now Available for Mac

The Babylon translation software, previously only available for PC's, now has a Mac version. Unfortunately the site offers little info about what it can do and no trial download. If anyone uses this, I'd be grateful for an evaluation.

Hebrew Localization of OS X

If you are interested in having the OS X menus and dialogues displayed in Hebrew, check out this page. If anyone installs it, I'd love to have an evaluation.

10 New Keyboards for iPod Touch and iPhone

It looks like the Sept 9, 2008 firmware update 2.1 provides the following 10 new keyboards to the iPhone 3G and the iPod Touch: Czech, Estonian, Croatian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Romanian, Slovak, and Turkish. However no new dictionaries (thus none for the keyboards mentioned above) have been added. Arabic or Hebrew or Greek input is also still not available.

The full list can be found in the tech specs.

Fonts for New Characters in Unicode 5.1

In an earlier article we mentioned the new scripts and other items included in Unicode 5.1. Fonts are now becoming available for some of them as indicated below.

Kayah Li, Cham, Ol Chiki, Rejang, Saurashtra, Vai: Code 2000

Carian, Lycian: Aegean

Lepcha, Lydian, Sundanese: None so far.

Phaistos Disk: Aegean, Code 2001

Dominoes: Code 2001, Unicode Symbols

Mahjong: Unicode Symbols

Optimus Multilingual Keyboard

Someone has actually finally gotten a copy of the long-awaited Optimus keyboard, which can display the keyboard layout for any language directly on its keys via 113 OLED screens underneath them. For more information see this blog.

This report indicates that the keyboard may not actually work the way one would expect, at least on a Windows machine.

Here is another review.

MobileMe Language Options Same as .Mac

MobileMe replaced .Mac July 11 or so. I had somewhat expected, given the broader international dimension of the marketing for the iPhone 3G, that this new service would also be available in a wide range of languages. As far as I can tell, however, it is limited to the same 4 as was .Mac -- English, French, German, and Japanese.

Sinhala Font and Keyboard for Testing

Thanks to Nick Shanks, there is now an OS X Sinhala font available for testing here. A first stab at a "wijeyasekara" keyboard layout for this script can be had on my iDisk.

I'm sure the keyboard has errors, so I would be grateful for any users willing to test it and report them to me for correction.

iPhone 3G Expands Language Capabilities

According to its tech specs, Apple's iPhone 3G, which was announced June 9 and should be available July 11, has language support for English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish.

International keyboard and dictionary support is available for English (U.S.), English (UK), French (France), French (Canada), German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean (no dictionary), Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish.

I understand that a software upgrade for the iPod Touch will be available in July to give it the same language features.

From reports I have received, fonts are now present for a number of additional languages, but the software is still not capable of correct display of complex scripts like Arabic, Devanagari, Tamil, and Tibetan which can be handled by the full OS X without problem.

Internationalized Domain Names

In recent months Internationalized Domain Names -- url's and email addresses written in scripts other than Latin -- have been set up for testing by ICANN. You can see whether your browser is equipped to handle the IDNA protocol which these use by clicking on links at the bottom of this page. You can similarly test your email client here.

Note the difference in what appears in the browser address bar when you point Safari at the topmost (Arabic) site and the (9th down) Russian site. The former will be in the native script, while the latter will be in an ASCII translation called Punycode. This is done because Russian script and Roman script can be confusable and create security problems. Which scripts generate Punycode is determined by a "whitelist" in the Safari app. Info on this and other aspects of Safari support for IDNA can be found here.

IDNA is currently limited to the range of scripts included in Unicode 3.2 in 2002. Since then nearly 30 more have been added, and the IETF is working on an update that will accommodate Unicode 5.1 and any future version

New Welsh Language Tools Available

Those who need to work in Welsh may be interested in Cysgliad, which has a spell and grammar checker plus dictionaries for this language. Look toward the bottom of the page for the OS X version.

Unicode 5.1

The Unicode Standard is expected to be officially updated to version 5.1 around the end of March, and a draft summary of the changes is available. 1624 new characters will be added, bringing to total number defined to 100,507. New scripts are Kayah Li, Cham, Lepcha, Ol Chiki, Rejang, Saurashtra, Sundanese, Vai, Carian, Lycian, Lydian, plus the Phaistos disc, dominoes, and Mahjong symbols.

Unicode 5.1 will also enable the use of ideographic variation sequences. These allow standardized representation of variant glyphs in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, according to the Uncode IV Database for such sequences.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Fix For Vietnamese VIQR IM

A reader of this blog has pointed out that the VIQR option in Leopard's new Vietnamese IM seems to be completely broken. For a possible replacement, download the layout found here.

More Dictionaries for Leopard's Dictionary.app

Besides the Chinese dictionary mentioned in an earlier entry, several others are now available. Tekl.de offers a German Thesaurus, German-English, and links for Arabic and Latin. David's Logbook provides info on how to use DictUnifier to convert StarDict sources into Dictionary.app modules.

An Arabic dictionary for the Quran can be had from Etresoft.

A Thai-English translation dictionary can be downloaded here.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Fixing the Macedonian Keyboard

Although Leopard corrected some errors in Tiger's Macedonian keyboard layout, the current version still seems to be missing two characters which should be used in certain circumstances, namely ѐЀ and ѝЍ. If you have an ISO/European keyboard, the fix is to download a replacement layout here. If you have an ANSI/US keyboard, you should download Macedonianz.keylayout from my iDisk..

If using Macedonianz, you make the extra characters by typing Option + `, followed by the base letter.

10.5.2 Update Fixes Russian-PC, Latvian, and Chinese Keyboards?

According to its release notes, the 10.5.2 update for OS X fixes the problems mentioned in this blog with the Russian PC and Latvian keyboard layouts that came with 10.5.0. But I still don't see any ё in the Russian-PC ANSI layout on my machine. Apparently it is only present on an ISO/European keyboard. On the other hand, although not mentioned, it looks like they may have fixed the bug in HaninYiTian.

Getting Your Mac to Speak Other Languages

For an excellent up-to-date reference on other voices for OS X's Text-To-Speech features, see this page at Ricky Buchanan's ATMac site.

If Your Chinese Characters Don't Look Quite Right....

A poster in the Apple Forums recently asked why certain Simplified Chinese characters did not look exactly the way he expected them to, giving as examples bao1 (U+5305) and fang2 (U+623F). Looking these up in the Character Palette, I discovered that they are characters where the Chinese and Japanese versions are visibly different. You can compare them here. The first column is Japanese, while the second two columns are Chinese.

So it appears that the poster's apps were using OS X's Japanese fonts instead of the Chinese ones that he wanted. Aside from switching to the correct font, one possible solution for this is to go to System Preferences/International/Languages and make sure that Simplified Chinese (简体中文) is higher on the list than Japanese (日本語).

This issue arises as a result of the unification of the Han Script in Unicode, under which slightly different versions of characters were given the same code point. Fonts produced for specific languages will nonetheless retain the different versions. For more info you can check here.

App for Advanced Korean Word Processing

If you work in Korean and need features beyond what normal Apple and Windows apps can provide, like additional fonts, vertical layout, spell checking, and support for ancient Hangul characters, I understand that the product to get is Hangul 2006 For Mac. A source for it is here. For more info on the app see this article.

Reading Non-Unicode Tibetan

Although OS X, starting with 10.5, includes support for Unicode Tibetan, it turns out that a number of important Tibetan language sites have not yet reached this point and still use custom fonts with legacy encodings. Examples are Radio Free Asia, SaveTibet.org and Tibet.net. To view these sites you will need to download and install the special font they use, TCRC YoutsoWeb. You might also need to try a different browser, like FireFox or Opera, rather than Safari, and fiddle with its font preferences.

You can download tcrcyweb.ttf here or from my iDisk.

As for official Chinese sites, these seem to be only in Chinese or to use graphics instead of text. An example of the latter is China Tibet News An example of a Chinese site in Unicode Tibetan is Tibet Information Technology Web.

Work-Around for Mail's NBSP Bug

A poster in the Apple forums has pointed out that Mail.app appears to have a strange bug: There is no way to input U+00A0/NBSP "No-Break Space". When you try to do this, either via the keyboard (Alt/Opt + space) or the Character Palette or via copy/paste, only an ordinary Space (U+0020) is produced in the text.

This is a problem because French text, for example, should ideally have an NBSP before certain punctuation, especially ! and ?. Using ordinary spaces means that these marks can get separated from the text they belong to at line endings, which is very ugly.

A possible work-around is use U+202F "Narrow No-Break Space" instead, which Mail.app does accept for input. Unfortunately I don't think any standard keyboard layouts have this character, so you have create a custom layout or input it from the Character Palette or via similar means. Also it could cause problems if the other end is using software that doesn't understand Unicode or fonts that don't handle 202F correctly.

The best tool for making a custom layout is Ukelele.