Bug in Apple Devanagari Font

A poster in the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that the font Devanagari Sangam used for iOS (and also available in OS X 10.7 and higher) produces the wrong glyph for the sequence r + virama + h.   For some reason it generates the glyph for the sequence r + virama + h + e instead.

The font Devanagari MT, which is the default for OS X, does not have this problem, so using that is a fix.  For iOS there is no way to avoid the bug until Apple fixes Devanagari Sangam.

Typing Runic

In addition to its historic uses, the Runic script appears in the recent Hobbit movie and the Tolkien book on which that is based.  To type Runic in OS X you need to add a font and a keyboard layout for the Unicode Runic range.  A good font is Quivira, and there are keyboards available here and here.

Unfortunately there is no way to type Runic yet in iOS devices.

OS X: Glitches With Traditional Chinese Cangjie Input

A poster in the Apple Support Communities recently pointed out that some Chinese characters cannot be made with the Cangjie sequences they were accustomed to, even though these worked fine on their iOS devices.

It turns out that OS X has different Cangjie sequences for certain characters.  You can see what these are by selecting the character and going to the "flag" (Input Source) menu when Cangjie is selected and then down to the bottom and choosing Find Input Code.

OS X Specialized Language Fonts

Various fonts provided with OS X have the necessary characters so they can be used for multiple languages.  For example, Arial can do English, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, and Arabic.  But Apple also provides a number of specialized fonts that are really only intended for one script.  Some have no Latin characters at all, and it is often best not to use those that do include Latin for pure Latin text. 

Such specialized fonts exist for Arabic, Armenian, Cherokee, Chinese, Cyrillic, Ethiopic, Hebrew, Indic Scripts, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Myanmar, Thai, Tibetan, and UCAS. You can see a rough list of them at this page.

Apple Opens Chinese Language Support Community

Apple has just opened a Chinese-language set of user-to-user discussion forums (the Apple  Support Communties), which you can get to at

https://discussionschinese.apple.com/

This joins the existing ASC's in English, Japanese, and Korean.

Alternative Text-to-Speech App for iOS

For those who want different voices than what Apple provides via the Speak Selection function in iOS,  I have recently come across an app Voice Dream which offers a possibly useful alternative for texts outside of Safari, Mail, iBooks, etc.

It covers 20 languages, including Catalan, which iOS does not yet have.  iOS languages currently missing from Voice Dream are Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Korean, Romanian, Slovak, and Thai.

A sort of free trial is available via the "Lite" version.

Bug In OS X Azeri Keyboard Layout

The Azeri keyboard layout provided by Apple with OS X has no question mark, which can be very inconvenient.   Possible remedies are

a) Create a shortcut for ? via system preferences/language & text/text/symbol and text substitution

b) Add ? to a custom layout created with Ukelele.

c) Download an alternative Azeri layout here.

Reading and Typing Traditional Mongolian Script

Traditional Mongolian is perhaps the most difficult script to display on a computer. Much like Arabic, Mongolian characters are connected and can have different forms in initial, medial, and final word positions. Plus it is written in vertical columns from left to right. Mongolian has some current usage in Mongolia and China, and was also employed for the Manchu language which was used (in addition to Chinese) for official documents of the Qing dynasty in China during 1644-1912.

To do this script on OS X you will need to download an AAT font and a keyboard layout from the mongolfont.com site.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, only the Windows IE browser can currently display the vertical ltr format which should ideally be used for classic mongolian.

Here are some test pages: Manchu and Mongolian

Typing Nuoso Yi in iOS

An earlier article provided some info on how to input Nuoso Yi in OS X.  Thanks to Dennis Walters you can now find a way to do the same on iOS devices on this page.

Reading And Writing 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 the BethMardutho fonts. To input Syriac you need to install a keyboard layout found here.

Xenotypetech also sells an excellent Syriac Language Kit.

You will need to deactivate the Damascus Arabic font provided with OS X, because it has a bug which interferes with Syriac fonts.

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

Apple Online Store Adds Keyboard Language Choices

Apple's US Online store traditionally has only offered English, French, (Western) Spanish, and Japanese keyboards when you tried to order a laptop machine.  Today I noticed that this has been expanded to add Arabic, British, Danish, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish.

Russian and Taiwanese are two languages which I have often heard requested which are apparently still not available.

iMac choices remain at the earlier 4 languages.

Asking a retail store for a special order is another option for getting Mac's with unusual keyboards.

Cuneiform Script Cyrus Cylinder Touring US

The Cyrus Cylinder, a clay tablet from  6th century BC Babylon, inscribed with a declaration in the name of Cyrus the Great, began a tour of the US this week which will take it to Washington DC, Houston, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

For those familiar with ancient languages and scripts, this is a famous and interesting example of Akkadian Cuneiform text.   A drawing of the Cuneiform is available online here, and a Latin transcription/English translation can be found here.

I was expecting to find a digital version of the text somewhere, since Cuneiform was added to Unicode back in 2006, but have been unsuccessful.   Info on fonts and keyboards for this script can be found in an earlier article..

Below is the Unicode Cuneiform and transcription for the first few words of line 20, translated as "I am Cyrus King of the world.."  You will need to install a cuneiform font to see it, and then it will not look exactly like the drawing, because cuneiform signs can vary greatly depending on the date, and there's no font yet for the Neo-Babylonian forms used on the cylinder.

𒀀 𒈾 𒆪 𒁹 𒆪 𒊏 𒑑 𒈗 𒆧 𒆳

a-na-ku ^m Ku-ra-áš LUGAL kiš-šat

Bug in Apple Kannada Font

The font Kannada Sangam displays the wrong glyph for the sequence RA plus Virama (U+0CB0, U+0CCD).   Instead OS X users should switch to the font Kannada MN.

Unfortunately in iOS only the Kannada Sangam font is available.

Bugs In iOS Cyrillic Font

A poster in the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that the font Market Felt Thin, one of the three available for the Notes App, uses a mixture of italic and regular letter forms when displaying Cyrillic text, which is not correct.  To avoid this, you need to switch to Helvetica or Noteworthy in the Settings for Notes.  In other apps, you can use Marker Felt Wide (but it has all italic forms).

The differences between Cyrillic regular and italic forms can be quite significant, as seen in this graphic:

Some fonts (including Marker Felt) have yet another form for italic д, which looks like a Latin "g".

Language Capabilities of Adobe InDesign/Illustrator

This blog page provides some useful info on maximizing the language capabilities of these Adobe products.

Chinese OCR in iOS Devices

One of the coolest features of the iPhone/iPod/iPad for Chinese users is the ability to simply photograph signs and texts and use the device to translate them.   I recently found the excellent Zhongweb Chinese blog which has an article comparing several apps available which can do the OCR function:

iOS Apps For Chinese OCR Showdown.

New Chinese Fonts in OS X 10.8

One of the added features in Mountain Lion promoted by Apple is "eight new fonts, from modern to classical, for Chinese users".  I actually count 10:  Baoli, Kaiti, Lantinghei, Libian, Songti, Wawati (SC & TC), Weibei (SC & TC), Xingkai, Yuanti, and Yuppi (SC & TC).

For some info on most of these, see this page.

I have seen a report that at least one of these fonts, Kaiti SC, has a meta-data setting which makes it non-embeddable in Adobe apps.  As far as I know, all the new fonts are embeddable when used in Apple apps.

(My research indicates the same problem may exist for the "old" Chinese fonts STFangsong, STKaiti, and STSong.)

Japanese-English Dictionary Missing in iOS 6

For some reason the Japanese-English dictionary that is available in OS X and was present in iOS 5 got lost in iOS 6.0 and is still missing in 6.1.   Among the complaints about this posted in the Apple Support Community are some ideas for apps that might be useful while waiting for Apple to fix the problem.  I mention 2 here -- other suggestions from readers are welcome.

Midori

imiwa?

PS I understand that there is a fix for this problem for jailbroken devices, but as a matter of policy I don't included that kind of thing in this blog.

Font Variation for Japanese Hiragana "ri"

Mac  OS X users who input Japanese may notice that the Hiragana character for "ri", U+308A, can appear in two different forms, shown below :

Which one is displayed depends on what font is used by the app or system.  The main Japanese font, Hiragino, uses the first (connected) version, while the Osaka Japanese font and some fonts for Chinese and Korean, plus Arial Unicode, use the second (two strokes).

The default font for Chinese/Japanese is often determined by the order of the languages in System Preferences > Language & Text > Language, so to guarantee you get a Japanese one you should make sure that language is higher on the list than Chinese or Korean.  If you want to have the two-stroke "ri", you will have to also switch Hiragino to Osaka.

iPad Turkish Keyboard Bug

Since iOS 6, there is a Turkish F screen keyboard layout available on the iPad.  Unfortunately it is not really usable, because the key for the Turkish dotless i (ı) is in the wrong place and also does not produce a dotless i unless you wait for the popup menu to appear and then select that character.

The recent iOS 6.1 update does not fix this.  Users can select the Turkish Q layout instead.

New Mac Font Editor

Type Light 3.2x, a new free font editor for OS X, has just been released, and a paid version with additional features is expected later this year.

Previously the only free app of this sort was FontForge, which is available here.  Other standard Mac font editors are FontLab, RoboFont,  and Glyphs.

Adding Dictionaries to Dictionary.app

As of OS X 10.8.2, Dictionary.app has modules for US English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese.  Some ways to add more are :

This site has German, Arabic, Latin, Chinese, Italian.

Etresoft has a dictionary for the Quran and two Bible dictionaries.

Others available are Italian, Norwegian, Catalan, and Romanian.

Here are instructions for getting and installing Apple's Dictionary Development Kit.

Emoji Notes

Emoji symbols were added to Unicode in its version 6.0 of October 2010, and Apple incorporated font support in iOS and OS X 10.7 shortly thereafter.  An earlier article provides a link to a good list of them.  When using these characters, it's helpful to be aware that :

A) Apple's Color Emoji Font embodies new technology and will not work in all apps.  In particular the OS X iWork apps, iBooks Author, and iWeb display nothing (although iOS iWork apps and iBooks work fine). Win OS before Win 7 can't see them, nor can older mobile devices which still use pre-Unicode emoji encodings.  An alternative black/white font which may work where color does not (except for flags) is Symbola.

B) The 10 flags which appear at the end of Apple's "Places" emoji category are not individual characters and can't be found as such in any Unicode chart.  These are a sort of "ligature" of two Unicode "Regional Indicator Symbols".  More info on this mechanism can be found on P. 534 here and here.

C) Some glyphs in Apple's font seem erroneous in design, like this one for "8 Pointed Black Star".

iOS Word Processor for Arabic/Hebrew

Because Pages for iOS has bugs which make it largely unsuitable for writing Arabic/Hebrew, I have been looking at other word processor apps to see if they could do things correctly. e.g. a) start the sentence at the right side of the page, b) normal cursor behavior,  and c) correct positioning of numbers, punctuation, and list headings -- while still having the the ability to produce rich text in various formats.

The best I have found so far is Textilus.   

But I am not much of an expert at Arabic/Hebrew.  If any readers know of shortcomings with Textilus or have other suggestions, please comment.

Secrets of Unicode Sorting

Recently a poster in the Apple Support Community pointed out some odd OS X sorting behavior for Latin accented characters, at least when "Standard" sorting is chosen in System Preferences > Language & Text > Language.  Indeed, the results seem counter-intuitive, with characters sorting differently depending on what characters follow them. Here is an example :

Single Character:          A  Á   À   Â   Å    Ä   Ã   Æ

Two Character String:  Ãb Äc Åd Âe Æa Àf Ág Ah

However strange it may appear, this is the correct result of the default Unicode sorting algorithm.  In that system every character is assigned 4 levels of "weights" and a particular formula is used to create sorting "keys" for character strings.  Certain groups of characters are considered essentially the same at the first level, so that the sorting order for a string can be determined by differences at the second level, which is potentially derived from the second character in the string.  To make sorting conform to the expectations of users of particular languages,  additional "tailoring" rules need to be set up to override the results of the Unicode default.

Readers wishing to explore further should see:

The Unicode Collation Algorithm

Chart Showing Groupings of Related Latin Characters

Page For Testing Sorting Under Various Settings Options

Info On Apple-Provided Fonts

Apple currently publishes two notes listing the fonts provided with its products:

For OS X 10.8, HT5379

For iOS 6, HT5484

Regarding conditions on their use, the OS X License reads as follows:

E. Fonts. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, you may use the fonts included with the Apple Software to display and print content while running the Apple Software; however, you may only embed fonts in content if that is permitted by the embedding restrictions accompanying the font in question. These embedding restrictions can be found in the Font Book/Preview/Show Font Info panel.

Paper Version of Unicode Standard Again Available

Unicode stopped publishing the hard copy edition of the Standard after Version 5.0, but has recently again made the core specification available via Lulu.  No code charts, but nearly 700 pages of useful info, nice quality paperback, reasonable price.  If interested, see this page.

Multilingual Mac Web Site Updated

I've recently updated and simplified the reference web site, Unleash Your Multilingual Mac.  Comments and corrections by viewers are always welcome.

Bugs in OS X Khmer and Myanmar Keyboard Layouts

Languages like Thai, Khmer, and Myanmar do not separate words with spaces, so achieving correct line endings can be a challenge.  Normally this is done automatically via a special dictionary or by the author typing a zero width space (ZWSP, U+200B) between each word.

While OS X has a Thai line breaking dictionary and includes ZWSP at Shift + space in the keyboard layout, neither of these have been provided for Khmer and Myanmar.  This makes the keyboard layouts included for these scripts kind of useless for some important purposes. 

For Khmer you can try instead the SBBIC keyboard.  This has ZWSP on the normal space key. Also you can get here a version of Apple's keyboard I modified to behave this way.

For Myanmar try the AviUnie layout..  It has ZWSP on the comma key.  A modified version of Apple's layout, with ZWSP on the space key, can be had here.

It also looks like the font Khmer Sangam cannot handle certain superscript combinations, so you need to use Khmer MN instead.  Both of Apple's Khmer fonts have the wrong glyph for nyo+coeng+nyo. An alternative is the font Khmer OS.

Emoji Name List

Both OS X and iOS have a very large number of Unicode Emoji characters available, either via a dedicated keyboard layout (iOS) or the Character Viewer (OS X).  For anyone interested in the formal names of all of them, which may indicate what they are intended to signify,  I have recently found a useful list here.

It is best to use Safari, as I think other browsers cannot yet handle the Apple Color Emoji font.

Unicode Bug in Pages

A poster in the ASC forums recently reminded me of a weird long-standing bug in the Pages app :  You cannot directly input the Unicode characters ZWJ (zero width joiner, 200D) or ZWJN (zero width non-joiner, 200C).  When you try to do so, they simply don't ever appear in the text.  I don't know of any other app which has this problem, which was noted in this blog back in 2008.

The main result of this bug is that there are certain character sequences used languages which employ the Arabic, S. Asian, and SE Asian scripts which cannot be written properly. A particularly notable example is the "Sri" in the name of the country Sri Lanka.  In its native Sinhala script, this is written with the sequence 0DC1 0DCA 200D 0DBB 0DD3.  When the 200D is left out, the result is wrong as shown here :

A possible workaround is to write your text which needs these characters in TextEdit and copy/paste into Pages.

New Mongolian Keyboard Layout

Thanks to the firm Mountain Edge, a new Mongolian Cyrillic keyboard layout is available for OS X.  It follows the MS Windows pattern and can be obtained here.

Those who prefer a QWERTY pattern layout can download mine from https://dl.dropbox.com/u/46870715/k/MongolianQWERTY.keylayout.zip.

Bugs in Apple's Telugu Font

A contributor to the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that the Telugu Sangam font provided by Apple in iOS and OS X has incorrect characters.  Preferably it should not be used for that language.  In particular the syllables "ho," "hoo," and "so" are wrong.  Telugu MN Bold has similar problems. Until Apple fixes these or replaces them with a better font, you should use Telugu MN Regular or download the alternative Ramaneeya.

(Unfortunately adding fonts to iOS devices is not yet possible.)

Thanks to Appaji Ambarisha Darbha for that font and the details on the wrong characters.

I notice that similar bugs in the Malayalam font described here have not yet been fixed.

New Braille Input Apps Available

For some time now there has been no way to use the standard keyboard to input Braille via the 6-key Perkins Brailler system -- the previously available apps had never been upgraded for OS X or Intel machines.  This has now been remedied thanks to Ethervision's Pro and Student Braille Writer for Mac OS.

For the iPad the same company has Braille Pad.

Myanmar/Burmese Bug in iOS 6

It's been reported in the Apple discussions, and I have verified it myself, that trying to view Unicode Myanmar/Burmese webpages, emails, etc. in iOS 6 can result in nasty freezes of the app being used, not always easy to recover from.  I'd recommend avoiding this script until Apple has a chance to fix the problem.

Note that iOS doesn't itself have a Myanmar font, so normally if you go to a site in this language you would only see squares, even if Safari did not freeze up.  But there are various apps that include a Unicode Myanmar font which let users read this language.

iOS 5 apparently did not have this problem (though I cannot test that any more).

I have seen a similar reports for the Khmer script and for the Thaana/Divehi script (used in the Maldives).

NOTE:  This bug was fixed with iOS 6.1 released Jan. 28, 2013.

iBookstore Adds Language Support

The latest iTunes Producer Guide, version 2.8, indicates that a number of new languages are now supported by iBooks and the iBookstore using the ePub 3 format.  iBooks 3 and iOS 6 are required.  These are:

Arabic, Burmese, Chinese, Dari, Hebrew, Japanese, Khmer, Kurdish, Lao, Malay, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tajik, Urdu, Uyghur, and Uzbek

(Unfortunately neither Pages nor iBooks Author can do the vertical layout and phonetic guides used in Chinese/Japanese books, and both have bugs with RTL scripts that make them normally unsuitable for Arabic, Dari, Hebrew, Kurdish, Pashto, Persian, Sindhi, Urdu, Uzbek, and Uyghur.) 

Some info on creating ePub 3 with vertical text is at

http://www.slideshare.net/liz_castro/writing-epub-3-tokyo-ebook-expo

http://epicsword.pixnet.net/blog/post/38345625

2/16/2013:  I have reports that despite what is written in the iTunes Producer Guide, the iBookstore will still not accept books in Arabic and other RTL scripts, even if the stated conditions are met. 

iBooks 3 Adds Support for Chinese/Japanese/Korean

At the Apple event Oct. 23, 2012, a new version 3 of iBooks was announced, including vertical layout and correct page turning for CJK scripts.

Support for embedded fonts has apparently also been added, as this feature has been put into a new version 2 of iBooks Author.

OS X 10.8.2: Japanese Display Issue Addressed

Apple has issued a supplemental update to 10.8.2 which "Resolves and issue that may cause certain Japanese characters to appear incorrectly in Mail."

iOS 6 Has New Reference Dictionaries

I have found that iOS 6 will download reference dictionaries for Spanish,  French and German if you hit the "define" item for a word in those languages.   This feature is buried in the release notes.  There is also a Chinese dictionary, as mentioned on Apple's "new feature" page.

OS X 10.8.2: New Language Features

In this update released Sept. 19, 2012, Apple has added a French module to Dictionary.app and added Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Korean, Canadian English, Canadian French, and Italian to the language coverage of the Dictation feature.

iOS 6 Language Features Published

(The same as OS 5 except for Siri, I believe)

Language Support

English (U.S.), English (UK), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

Keyboard Support

English (U.S.), English (UK), Chinese - Simplified (Handwriting, Pinyin, Stroke), Chinese - Traditional (Handwriting, Pinyin, Zhuyin, Cangjie, Stroke), French, French (Canadian), French (Switzerland), German (Germany), German (Switzerland), Italian, Japanese (Romaji, Kana), Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cherokee, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Emoji, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian (Cyrillic/Latin), Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

Dictionary Support (enables predictive text and autocorrect)

English (U.S.), English (UK), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), French, French (Canadian), French (Switzerland), German, Italian, Japanese (Romaji, Kana), Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Catalan, Cherokee, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

Siri Languages

English (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia), Spanish (U.S., Mexico, Spain), French (France, Canada, Switzerland), German (Germany, Switzerland), Italian (Italy, Switzerland), Japanese, Korean, Mandarin (Mainland China, Taiwan), Cantonese (Hong Kong)

New software keyboard layouts have been added for German, French, Turkish, Catalan, Arabic, and Icelandic.  A full list is at this page.

This page gives info on which iOS 6 features are available in which country:

http://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/

New Character Map App

Many users have been annoyed by Apple's deletion of the View = Glyph feature in the revised Character Viewer app of OS X 10.7 and later, which made it impossible to directly view and input the entire glyph catalog of individual fonts.   Ultra Character Map restores that capability:

http://www.x04studios.com/ultracharactermap.html

Unfortunately, for glyphs without Unicode code points, input is limited to a graphic of the glyph, rather than a normal "character".

OS X 10.8.1: Chinese Input Issue Addressed

Apple has released an update to Mountain Lion, 10.8.1, which includes a fix to "Address an issue that could cause the system to become unresponsive when using Pinyin input".

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5418

OS X 10.8: Chinese Text Converter Problem

Many users are finding that after upgrading to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, the service for converting between Traditional and Simplified Chinese no longer works.  For a fix see this post in the Apple Support Community.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: New Language Features

OS X 10.8 was released 7/25/2012.  It has no new OS/App localizations, keyboards for additional languages, or spellcheck dictionaries, but the 3 new reference dictionaries (German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese) are most welcome.  Plus there are a lot of new features for Chinese users, the details of which can be found at

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html#china

Note that the new Chinese fonts are "off" by default.  When you "enable" them, the OS will ask you to download them.  Also you may need to switch system preferences/language & text/region to China temporarily to see the new Chinese services in system preferences/mail, contacts & calendars and in app menus.

Dictation is available in English (US, UK, Australia), French, German, and Japanese.  Any comments on how well it works in these languages would be welcome.

(I'm a little surprised there are no keyboards for Ethiopic/Amharic or Lao, since the requisite fonts were added already in 10.7)

iOS 6 Language Features Announced at WWDC 6/11

Siri languages expanded to include English, Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, German, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean.

New Chinese Features: "With precision text input, a comprehensive up-to-date Chinese dictionary, and handwriting recognition support for over 30,000 Chinese characters, iOS 6 gives Chinese speakers more features than ever. You can mix full and abbreviated Pinyin and even type English words in a Pinyin sentence without switching keyboards. And when you add words to your personal dictionary, iCloud makes them available on all your devices. Baidu is a built-in option in Safari, and you can share videos directly to Youku and Tudou. You can also post to Sina Weibo from Camera, Photos, Maps, Safari, and Game Center.."

(iOS 6 to be released 9/19/2012)

OS X 10.8 Language Features Announced at WWDC 6/11

New Dictionary.app modules for German, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese

Dictation in English (U.S., UK, and Australia), French, German, and Japanese

Lots of things for Chinese, including improved input methods and 8 new fonts.  For details see

Chinese Features

(OS X 10.8 to be released in July)

Diacritic Variations in Polytonic Greek

A poster in the Apple forums recently asked how he could get a particular form of the circumflex/perispomoni accent to appear in his ancient Greek text.  There are namely two common variations, one looks like a tilde and one like an inverted breve, and he needed the latter.

It turns out that the form of this diacritic for Greek depends on the font.  Of those which cover this range that come with OS X 10.7, Arial Unicode, Geneva, Helvetica, and Times have the inverted breve form, while the rest (Arial, Courier New, Helvetica Neue, Lucida Grande, Menlo, Microsoft Sans, Palatino, Tahoma, Times New Roman) use the tilde.

For some more info, see Section 1.2 of

http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/gkdiacritics.html

Font With New Turkish Lira Symbol

Thanks to Michael Everson, there is now a font available for those who need to display/print the new Turkish Lira symbol.  See

http://evertype.com/fonts/rupakara/

Bug In Apple Malayalam Fonts

A poster in the Apple discussions has pointed out the neither of the two fonts provided by Apple for the Malayalam script in OS X and iOS display the correct glyphs for the yy and vv consonant clusters, which are supposed to represent the second member by a small triangle under the first character.

To get correct display in OS X you will have to use the font sold by XenoTypeTech or the Rachana font from

http://sites.google.com/site/macmalayalam/

(Unfortunately adding fonts to iOS devices is not yet possible).

PS There appears to be another bug with incorrect display when two viramas are typed in succession (or the lack of a ZWNJ on the keyboard to create the equivalent effect).

12/3/12  These bugs have not been fixed as of 10.8.2