Saturday, September 21, 2013

iOS 7 Language Glitches

I  have seen the following reports in the Apple Support Communities of problems with language support:

+Greek keyboard missing at some stage, so that users with Greek characters in their password can't get access to their devices.  (Fixed with update 7.02?)

+Broken display of Arabic and Korean in some apps.

+New 10-key (T9) Pinyin Chinese input method is only present on devices sold in China .

+New 10-key (T9) Korean input method only present on devices sold in Korea.

+A new, modernistic default font for Thai which some users find barely legible.

+The new Tamil99 keyboard has wrong characters on a number of keys in the shift level.

+Copy/paste causes crashes when the OS is running in Hebrew.

(This is the first time I have ever seen Apple issue an OS with some keyboards only available in one country.  They had to suddenly remove reference to the Chinese one from a long-standing webpage describing new features in iOS 7)

Contributions by readers of other items to this list are welcome. 

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

iOS 7 Language Specs Published

It looks to be the same as for iOS 6 except for the addition of keyboard and dictionary support for Tamil, English (Canadian), and English (Australian).  Although not mentioned in the specs, I understand Chinese/Pinyin includes a new "10 key" option, which is something Chinese users have long wanted.

Also not mentioned are the new reference dictionaries:  Chinese-English, Korean, Korean-English, Italian, Dutch (added to the English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Japanese-English already available earlier).

Scripts where iOS 7 has font support but no keyboard are Armenian, Bengali, Canadian Aboriginal, Georgian, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Lao, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Telugu, Yi.

Update 9/24/13:  The 10-key Chinese IM is so far only available in China.  A full list of keyboard layouts elsewhere can be found here.  One new one I noticed is an ABNT2 hardware layout for Portuguese, which will be welcome in Brazil.


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 (Canadian), English (UK), English (Australian), 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, Tamil, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

Dictionary Support (enables predictive text and autocorrect)

English (U.S.), English (Canadian), English (UK), English (Australian), 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, Tamil, 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)