tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61796005103769409592012-01-28T10:36:38.975-07:00Devoted to tips and other info on how to use your Mac to read and write languages other than EnglishTom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.comBlogger2651100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-58053759962751495852012-01-19T09:35:00.002-07:002012-01-19T09:40:43.925-07:00

My initial tests indicate that the new iBook Author app announced by Apple 1/19/12 has the same bugs with Arabic/Hebrew input as the iWork apps and iWeb have always had. There is no setting for "writing direction" (such as found in TextEdit) and the cursor doesn't work properly, so that editing via insertion/deletion is pretty much impossible.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-64922222783794675302012-01-12T13:28:00.003-07:002012-01-12T13:34:24.653-07:00

A new Korean version of the Apple discussion forums (known formally as ASC -- Apple Support Communities) has become available athttps://discussionskorea.apple.com/index.jspaAs far as I know, until now the only other non-English forum run by Apple was that for Japanese:https://discussionsjapan.apple.com/index.jspa

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-5438919685616063172011-12-22T15:35:00.002-07:002011-12-22T15:38:36.506-07:00

Anyone interested in finding downloadable copies of Loeb bilingual Greek/Latin classical texts, many of which are out of copyright, should check out this site.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-80371866281346530642011-12-21T12:04:00.000-07:002011-12-21T12:05:11.826-07:00

I recently got a query from a user indicating that Kurdish in Windows docs was appearing on their Mac with various Arabic language letters where Kurdish characters should be.I could not figure out how that would happen, until I stumbled across a wikipedia article telling how special "Ali" fonts had been devised to let Windows users who only had an Arabic keyboard layout could still create text

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-13429964504508340562011-12-20T12:45:00.010-07:002011-12-22T08:27:18.763-07:00

Since my earlier article on this topic, updated specifications for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNA2008) have been published. As a result, users can probably expect to see a rapid increase in urls written in scripts other than Latin.Because of security concerns about phishing and other possible misuse of IDN's, browser makers have adopted (differing) mechanisms to filter the way users see

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-62488945126663040792011-12-18T20:51:00.000-07:002011-12-18T20:52:07.280-07:00

An earlier article provides some basic info on adding other modules to the OS X Dictionary.app.This site has several of these, including translation dictionaries for French/English, German/English, Spanish/English, and Latin/English.Others I have seen are Italian, Norwegian, and Romanian.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-1306275479711705652011-12-12T10:42:00.002-07:002011-12-12T12:53:18.959-07:00

The N'Ko (ߒߞߏ) script, used for writing a number of West African languages, was the topic of a NY Times article recently.For those wishing to read/write N'ko on OS X, try the font and keyboard available here or the kit from XenoTypeTech.For using N'Ko on iOS devices, get the Tw Tool N'ko app.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-71489885368095217712011-12-05T15:22:00.004-07:002011-12-09T15:39:09.553-07:00

Classic Mongolian Script is notoriously difficult to input and display on a computer -- OS X 10.7 still cannot handle it -- but there is now an app for this for iOS devices: Mongolian Type Writer. Emails, for example, include both a graphic in vertical format and a text file in horizontal format.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-80766947216197072322011-11-14T11:25:00.010-07:002011-11-15T15:23:53.022-07:00

In the Apple Support Communities someone reported they were seeing the Japanese version of Han characters when they should be seeing the Chinese version. This can happen because the default Han font used by iOS for plain text is determined by the order of languages on the list in Settings > General > International > Language. To make sure the default font is for Chinese, one fix is to switch

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-13909082681828837992011-11-12T09:20:00.001-07:002011-11-12T09:21:59.974-07:00

The Cherokee Qwerty keyboard layout provided with OS X is not ideal, because the key sequences required for some characters do not match those normally used by this language -- e.g. Ꮭ is typed R-A instead of t-l-a.Using a script created by SIL, I have put together an experimental alternative layout which avoids these issues. Readers are welcome to test it and report any problems.http://

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-16213480140770856742011-11-10T06:39:00.002-07:002011-11-10T06:41:13.727-07:00

The Google Translate app for iOS described in an earlier article has been expanded to cover a number of additional languages, including experimental support for Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu.Text translation is now available for 63 languages, voice input for 17, and text-to-speech conversion for 24. I find the audio input/output features kind of amazing.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-8862565558618548982011-10-28T18:21:00.005-06:002011-11-02T11:54:56.977-06:00

A reader of this blog has pointed out to me that, apparently without any notice, Apple has expanded OS X support for OpenType font features, so that at least some apps can now use Windows fonts as well as the AAT fonts supplied by Apple for complex Indic scripts like Devanagari. A good test is to use the font Sanskrit 2003 in TextEdit. This is a major improvement, because it opens up a much

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-85461576623976603532011-10-13T14:59:00.003-06:002011-11-10T07:54:36.337-07:00

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/ios5kbs.htmlScripts for which iOS5 does have font support (so it can display web pages, email and other text) but still no keyboard for input are Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Telugu, Sinhala, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Armenian, Georgian, Lao, and YiCertain apps can be used to create custom keyboards that may be useful.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-28264846535275627242011-10-13T08:41:00.004-06:002011-10-13T08:44:59.329-06:00

The latest version of iOS Pages, 1.5, which requires iOS 5, provides some CJK-specific text-formatting features, including emphasis styles, list styles, and phonetic guides. For details see this page:http://help.apple.com/pages/ipad/1.5/#tanfbd4156eIt appears that vertical text is still not supported.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-59331697010160557942011-10-12T14:47:00.002-06:002011-11-13T08:12:41.554-07:00

New OS Languages: NoneNew Keyboards: Hindi, HawaiianNew Dictionaries: Hindi, Hawaiian, Estonian, Latvian, Cherokee(Keyboards still without dictionaries: Bulgarian, Icelandic, Macedonian, Serbian, Tibetan)(Fonts still without keyboards: Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Telugu, Sinhala, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Armenian, Georgian, Lao, and Yi)Note that SIRI is only available on the iPhone

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-13510773834758910012011-10-04T12:50:00.009-06:002011-10-14T14:52:20.791-06:00

At the 10/4 event announcing the iPhone 4S, Apple said the "Siri" personal assistant of this device will include dictation capabilities and its other speech recognition features in English (US, UK, Australia), French, and German. More languages were promised for later (including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish in 2012). I understand that an internet connection is required.The 4S

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-77398112752525454932011-09-07T06:59:00.001-06:002011-09-07T06:59:47.128-06:00

Dhivehi/Maldivian is spoken by about 350,000 people in the Republic of Maldives. It uses the right-to-left Thaana script, for which OS X does not yet have either a font or a keyboard layout.For a keyboard layout, try this:http://www.mohamedmalik.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/thaana_osx.zipFor fonts, try these:http://mvheadlines.com/downloads/fonts.zipI'm not sure which app will display Dhivehi

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-31987164720680494242011-09-05T06:01:00.002-06:002011-09-05T06:05:22.485-06:00

There have been several complaints in the Apple discussions about the omission in Lion of the YiTian keyboard layout in the Traditional Chinese Zhuyin IM. A recent post recommends Yahoo KeyKey as an alternative: http://tw.media.yahoo.com/keykey/ I don't know enough about this to evaluate it, and would welcome any comments by readers.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-8333796557872269852011-09-04T12:37:00.001-06:002011-09-04T12:39:38.140-06:00

If you are seeing something strange where the Simplified Chinese character 门 (men2, U+95E8) should appear, there is nothing wrong with your system or app. It turns out that the Hiragino Japanese fonts supplied with OS X have an unusual version of this, which I've been told can be found in Japanese handwriting (see blue item in graphic below). Normally Japanese computer text will have the

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-55730544986279841392011-08-30T18:29:00.001-06:002011-08-30T18:30:55.766-06:00

http://www.spider-mac.com/2010/09/04/l-plug-in-dizionario-italiano-per-leopard-e-snow-leopard/

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-12969755884388700542011-08-13T07:23:00.003-06:002011-08-13T07:25:59.198-06:00

I've seen several reports in the Apple Discussions from users who have system alerts or other menus/dialogues in two languages at once, such as English and Arabic, or English and Danish. A possible fix for this is to go to system preferences/language & text/language and use the Edit button to uncheck the box for the language you don't want and then restart.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-15077832620778412012011-07-22T16:55:00.002-06:002011-07-22T16:58:46.910-06:00

A new Lion feature taken over from iOS is the "Character Picker", which generates a popup menu of accented characters when you hold down the base letter on the keyboard. Some users detest this, as it stops the key repeat function which normally results when you hold down a key. To get rid of Character Picker, open Terminal and typedefaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool falseand then

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-28696519584778107872011-07-20T10:59:00.002-06:002011-10-31T15:22:53.966-06:00

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/osx7.htmlA bug: Bopomofo input is messed up when the candidate window is vertical. Switch to horizontal to get it to work right.(Fixed in 10.7.2)

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-8312870869542875052011-07-20T06:46:00.002-06:002011-11-13T08:54:51.332-07:00

New OS and App localizations: Arabic, Czech, Hungarian, and Turkish. These bring the total to 22.New languages supported with both fonts and keyboards: Bangla, Georgian, Kannada, Khmer, Kurdish, Malayalam, Myanmar, Oriya, Sinhala, Telugu, Urdu. These have about 600 million speakers all together.New languages/scripts supported with fonts only: Ethiopic/Amharic, Lao, EmojiNew languages supported

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-78175693505026646442011-06-26T08:51:00.004-06:002011-06-26T08:55:45.494-06:00

Pinyin is the official standard for using the Latin script to represent Mandarin Chinese. There is now an app which makes it really easy to type Pinyin on iOS devices and then email the result or copy/paste it to other apps:http://troubadourworks.com/pinyintypist/

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-70830476841892110082011-06-25T15:33:00.001-06:002011-06-25T15:33:20.868-06:00

Nuosu Yi is spoken by a couple million people in SW China and is written using several hundred characters representing individual syllables. Further info can be found on the Babelstone Yi Page, and links to several useful resources are available here. Both OS X and iOS come with fonts for reading/writing Unicode Yi.The logical way to type Nuosu Yi is with an input method like those used for

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-57521851940084222112011-06-22T07:10:00.003-06:002011-06-22T18:25:02.931-06:00

While the "supported" languages for iOS are listed in the tech specs for the iPad and related devices, iOS 4 also includes fonts that permit display of a number of additional languages and scripts in apps such as Safari, Mail, and Pages. These include Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Telugu, Sinhala, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Armenian, Georgian, Lao, and Yi.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-78990201357674278632011-06-21T08:57:00.003-06:002011-06-21T09:03:50.276-06:00

I had thought that Apple might add more language localizations when totally redesigning Final Cut Pro, but from the Mac App Store entry which appeared today these remain at the traditional 4: English, French, German, and Japanese. OS X Lion and its non-pro apps will have 22 when released this summer.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-19622357592889897952011-06-19T16:02:00.000-06:002011-06-19T16:03:17.250-06:00

http://home.no/stavekontroll/mac.html

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-47474369705707220312011-06-17T11:16:00.002-06:002011-06-17T11:23:33.491-06:00

Anyone interested in Romanian language localizations of OS X and some apps should check out this site. For Slovak, see here.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-21702617425607232022011-06-06T15:18:00.001-06:002011-06-12T16:00:49.997-06:00

Apple has released more info on new features in OS X 10.7 Lion. Of interest related to languages are:+Voices in 23 languages (compared to 1 in Snow Leopard).+Safari support for vertical text and Web Open Font Format (WOFF)+New System Localizations in Arabic, Czech, Turkish, and Hungarian+iOS-like access to accented characters via a pop-up dialogue when you click on a character+General support

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-32741169819507931552011-06-03T14:49:00.001-06:002011-06-03T14:49:44.822-06:00

Apple provides only a limited selection of spell checkers for OS X. But you can also add dictionaries used by OpenOffice. You just put the .dic and .aff files in Home/Library/Spelling. There are two good sources for these:1) http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries2) http://extensions.services.openoffice.org:80/en/dictionariesWhat you download from the second source will have the

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-35108277574789420962011-05-10T16:18:00.000-06:002011-05-10T16:19:21.812-06:00

Burmese/Myanmar is spoken by an estimated 42 million people in S.E Asia. Support for this script is not yet included in OS X, but XenotypeTech offers a commercial kit for the Mac.Sources of free fonts and keyboards are:http://edwardwitten.blogspot.com/2007/10/zawgyi-myanmar-keyboard-for-mac-os-x.htmlhttp://www.myanmaritpro.com/There seem to be two standards in common use. Some info about their

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-66672814035593313142011-05-10T14:41:00.003-06:002011-06-22T07:37:38.969-06:00

Those wishing to read and write Burmese/Myanmar on iOS devices should try the apps iMyanmar and MMKeyboard.I would be interested in any reports about how well they work. These apps incorporate a Burmese font to make up for the lack of one in iOS.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-81625000708158677362011-05-06T09:22:00.003-06:002011-05-07T19:10:53.754-06:00

While there is still no way to create custom keyboards for iOS the way you can for OS X, I have seen two apps which let you produce keyboards that can be used to generate text for emailing or copy/pasting into other apps. These are UniKey and Unicode Map. UniKey comes with keyboards already made for Georgian, Armenian, Chess, and Afrikaans.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-29217505504709772302011-04-25T20:54:00.003-06:002011-04-26T07:05:05.972-06:00

Earlier I mentioned the Padma extension to Firefox which lets you read web pages in various Indic languages that require custom fonts. I have recently found a Gateway site which converts a number of such sites to Unicode so you can read them on any browser, as long as you have a Mac Unicode font installed for the script:http://uni.medhas.org/Scripts covered are Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati,

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-48542309989147295522011-04-21T09:33:00.001-06:002011-04-21T09:35:33.077-06:00

A poster in the Apple Support Communities recently pointed out that iOS devices cannot display the character Latin Capital Letter Sharp S (U+1E9E), which was added to Unicode in 2008 and can potentially be found in German language text. Oddly even the full OS X only has one font that includes this character, Geneva Regular. For some background, seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_ß

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-58659110037891313962011-04-17T10:49:00.001-06:002011-04-17T10:50:58.048-06:00

For a page that displays all 109,384 characters in Unicode 6.0 in succession, go here:http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2011/04/unicode-60-one-character-at-time.html

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-31757432572394859082011-03-20T12:26:00.002-06:002011-03-20T12:35:51.274-06:00

Danslav Slavenskoj has recently published as series of useful extensions for the Safari and Chrome browsers that will transliterate among a number of Slavic languages. You can find them athttp://slavenica.com/browser/(Note that these change the way text is displayed on the browser, and you may mistakenly think that something is wrong with your system if you forget that you have them activated.)

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-34033777001468120732011-03-20T09:32:00.002-06:002011-03-20T09:43:42.582-06:00

The Google Translate app released in February for iOS devices has the capability to transcribe speech in one language, translate it into another, and then speak out the translated text. I tried this with some simple phrases and found it kind of amazing. The languages covered for speech input besides English are Japanese, Chinese, Afrikaans, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish,

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-82556417948736926342011-03-19T18:30:00.004-06:002011-03-19T18:34:31.340-06:00

I recently discovered the SIL TypeTuner site, which may be of interest to others. It enables you to download customized versions of the SIL special language fonts Andika Basic, Charis SIL, Gentium Plus, Doulos SIL, Lateef, and Scheherazade with a range of special features which you can select from a menu. To try it out, go tohttp://scripts.sil.org/ttw/fonts2go.cgiI assume that these fonts can

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-63111423219805641242011-03-07T12:17:00.003-07:002011-04-09T15:25:05.383-06:00

Apple's recent preview of OS X 10.7 Lion does not mention any new language features, but some of the rumor sites like Macrumors and Appleinsider have published reports of a) Arabic system localization, b) voices for text-to-speech for languages other than English, and c) access to accented characters via a popup menu when a key is held down.Update: A 4/8 report by Appleinsider indicates TextEdit

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-38617690744862082092011-02-17T15:38:00.002-07:002011-02-17T15:42:58.008-07:00

As mentioned in an earlier article, iOS currently includes fonts for a half-dozen Indic languages which are not yet part of OS X (Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Sinhala). Thanks to Nick Shanks there is now a way to use them in OS X as well. See this page for info.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-12069074785770467702011-01-16T08:43:00.000-07:002011-01-16T08:44:08.578-07:00

For those interested in the Ethiopic script, used to write Amharic, SIL has recently released a new version of its Abyssinica font and OS X keyboard layout, which can be obtained here.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-57018550549152249442010-12-23T16:39:00.004-07:002011-06-16T11:38:54.527-06:00

There is now an app, IndicNotes, which provides a way to input Devanagari, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, and Gurmukhi on the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch. You can copy/paste what you compose into other apps or share directly via email, facebook, or twitter.PS (6/16/11) Another option are the PaniniKeypad apps, which are available for Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Punjabi, Malayalam, and Tamil.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-45334312051726264022010-12-17T06:23:00.002-07:002010-12-17T06:25:58.217-07:00

http://questvisual.com/Only Spanish/English at the moment.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-41133332495187755232010-12-05T08:34:00.003-07:002010-12-05T08:39:07.575-07:00

In the iBookstore Publisher User Guide it says:"What languages does the iBookstore NOT support?At this time, the iBookstore does not support the following languages: Persian, Old (ca.600- 400 B.C.), Persian, Samaritan Aramaic, Amharic, Arabic, Official Aramaic (700-300 BCE), Imperial Aramaic (700-300 BCE), Burmese, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Arabic,Central Khmer, Lao, and

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-68737439250652097972010-11-30T11:02:00.002-07:002010-11-30T11:04:24.129-07:00

Q: In which countries has the iPad been officially released for sale, and when?A:April 3: USMay 28: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UKJuly 23: Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore.September 17: China, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, PeruNovember 30: Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland,

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-84554074877577616042010-11-23T16:44:00.003-07:002010-11-25T15:24:16.033-07:00

I just noticed that the Safari on my iPad with iOS 4.2.1 will display embedded .ttf/.otf fonts -- fonts that are not part of iOS but downloadable from a web page. For an example try my Egyptian Test Page. This is a very important capability, since users are not able to add any fonts to iOS devices.My iPod Touch, still on iOS 4.0, lacks this feature, so it must be new. Also the new WOFF format,

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-89354809569877976302010-11-22T12:40:00.007-07:002010-12-06T09:33:38.381-07:00

iOS 4.2 for the iPad was released today and as expected it brings the language capabilities of the iPad up to those available for a while now in the iPhone/iPod Touch, including Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Korean, Traditional Chinese, etc. A full list can be seen in the updated iPad Tech Specs:http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/No keyboards are yet available for Indic scripts, even though fonts are

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-61251872741727982912010-11-15T15:36:00.006-07:002011-01-04T09:19:07.232-07:00

The Help for Office 2011 for Mac provides the following list of supported input keyboards and methods:"Australian, Austrian, Belgian, Brazilian, British, Bulgarian, Canadian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dvorak, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Inuktitut, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian (F.Y.R.O.), Northern Sami, Norwegian,

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-5825164886591724442010-10-12T08:55:00.002-06:002010-10-12T08:56:28.163-06:00

http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-12018959817419671432010-09-28T15:13:00.008-06:002010-10-16T08:21:30.900-06:00

With the announcement of the Oct. 26 release date and appearance of a MacWorld review, we are wondering whether Word will in fact finally support RTL scripts. This blog entry last month seemed to indicate "no", but the MacWorld reviewer has posted a "yes" for Arabic in the comments section of his own piece.Some earlier postings based on beta versions seemed to say "yes" or "only for reading".

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-36786002115593154162010-09-27T15:38:00.002-06:002010-09-29T15:58:47.573-06:00

I've seen a couple of reports in the Apple Discussions about Pages and other apps in 10.6.4 refusing to recognize the OS X British English spell checking dictionary for certain users regardless of the care taken to ensure various settings are right for that.One fix that has worked in some cases is to download the OED dictionary from this site, install the .dic and .aff files in Home/Library/

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-52473358126275750792010-09-19T14:53:00.004-06:002010-09-29T15:59:44.293-06:00

David Perry has recently completed the 2nd Edition of his excellent "Document Preparation for Classical Languages," which covers such topics as Unicode, smart font technology, and how to choose typefaces and editing tools, with special reference to Classical, Biblical, and Medieval Studies and Linguistics. For more info go tohttp://scholarsfonts.net/docproc.html

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-49383336173899651162010-09-15T15:30:00.005-06:002010-09-29T16:00:08.993-06:00

Some sites have published info about iOS 4.2 beta which has been made available to developers for testing before release in November. According to this, the iPad will have the following virtual keyboards at that time:English, English (UK), Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cherokee, S. Chinese (handwriting, pinyin, stroke), T. Chinese (handwriting, pinyin, cangjie, stroke, zhuyin), Croatian, Czech,

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-5161357335468598582010-09-02T05:25:00.003-06:002010-09-03T10:25:31.102-06:00

Apple has announced the availability of iOS 4.2 for the iPad in November, including "Keyboard and dictionary enhancements: Choose from more than 30 new keyboards and dictionaries, including Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew."Under Accessibility, they show "Output in braille to over 30 supported wireless Bluetooth refreshable braille displays in more than 25 languages."(I count 13 keyboards in the

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-31864447793428754972010-09-01T15:41:00.001-06:002010-09-01T15:47:26.747-06:00

According to the tech specs of the new iPod Touch announced today, some additional languages have been added in its version of iOS 4:UI: CherokeeLocalized Keyboards: Tagalog, CherokeeLocalized Dictionaries: Tagalog(Annoyingly no language info is included in the tech specs for the new Apple TV.)

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-57466801424212353722010-08-16T09:17:00.005-06:002010-08-21T06:17:55.370-06:00

Readers interested in new possibilities that will be offered by the proposed CSS3 standards for webpages and other documents (e.g. ePub) that use Cascading Style Sheets may find it useful to check out the current drafts of the Text Layout Module and the Fonts Module.In the proposed Text Layout Module are rules for specifying direction and block flow which should better enable display of vertical

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-46096467246077675272010-07-29T13:43:00.006-06:002010-08-16T15:22:38.475-06:00

Although Apple totally fails to mention it, the new Magic Trackpad will do Chinese Handwriting input just like the multitouch trackpad of certain Apple laptops. The July 29 report here may be of use to people who want to try it.Update 8/13/2010: Apple has now documented this feature here.As with the laptop feature, Japanese is not supported.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-59444458957496655112010-07-28T18:08:00.008-06:002010-11-01T07:57:16.302-06:00

As of 11/1/2010, the iPad app store lists keyboards for Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese, Greek, Korean, Dvorak, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish, Czech, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Icelandic, Finnish, Serbian (Cyr), Serbian (Latin), Catalan, Macedonian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, and Pashto.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-32529278721336974902010-07-25T11:17:00.002-06:002010-07-25T11:24:56.260-06:00

A good number of Indic language web sites have not yet converted to Unicode, but still require custom fonts and are designed to work only with special dynamic font support available in the Windows IE browser. Viewing them on a Mac can be tedious, since you have to find and install the font used by the site and then hope a Mac browser will recognize it. An easier alternative is to download the

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-57797574189819650792010-07-17T13:07:00.006-06:002010-09-29T11:52:09.735-06:00

Anyone who has tried to work with PDF files whose content includes complex scripts has probably noticed that copy/paste and searching rarely if ever work. For those interested in this problem, here are five useful blog posts with comments that discuss this, with examples from Tamil:http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/07/06/10031112.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/07/16

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-59678033328214381032010-07-13T04:17:00.002-06:002010-07-13T04:20:47.056-06:00

The LanguageGeek website has available a large number of OS X keyboard layouts for Native American languages. Check this page for further into and download links:http://www.languagegeek.com/keyboard_general/mainkeyboards.html

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-51025180239968117382010-07-01T06:20:00.004-06:002010-07-29T14:40:10.080-06:00

WinSoft has announced ScribeDOOR, which expands the capabilities of standard versions of Adobe InDesign or Illustrator CS4 or CS5 to edit and treat text in various complex scripts. According to their specs, support includes Arabic, Azeri, Bengali, Farsi, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer/Cambodian, Lao, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Thai, Urdu, and

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-54185645504161215532010-06-22T04:08:00.017-06:002010-08-28T11:26:44.071-06:00

A major surprise after installing iOS4 on my iPod: Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, and Tamil display correctly! Not only that, this OS has Indic fonts that OS X is still missing: Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Sinhala, Kannada, and Malayalam. Plus Lao. There is a bug in Sinhala.Major scripts still not available are Ethiopic, Khmer and Burmese. There is a Tibetan font, but it does not render

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-41003461522591606812010-06-20T13:14:00.002-06:002010-06-20T13:16:37.630-06:00

Thanks to Sorin Paliga you can download a Romanian Dictionary that functions as a part of the OS X Dictionary.app from this location:http://command-n.ro/forum/files/download/8-dex-offline/

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-45419885238872437582010-06-10T15:40:00.007-06:002010-06-13T14:06:03.489-06:00

MS Word for Mac currently cannot do complex scripts such as Arabic or Hindi, and it looks like the next edition, to be released with Office Mac 2011, won't have that capability either. But my initial tests of the Word Web App now available as part of Windows Live Office indicate that these scripts are possible when using this "cloud" version. A reader with a PC has confirmed that they display

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-36577737307393647332010-06-07T17:33:00.006-06:002010-06-24T10:06:15.775-06:00

Judging from the tech specs for iPhone 4, the new iOS 4 (formerly iPhone OS 4), available for iPhones and iPod Touch starting June 21, has the following added language features compared to the current version:Localizations: Hungarian, Catalan, and VietnameseKeyboards: Cangjie and Wubihua for Chinese, plus Catalan and VietnameseDictionaries: Hungarian, Flemish, Catalan, VietnameseVoice Control:

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-37076045895182673092010-05-29T04:48:00.004-06:002010-05-29T04:53:20.286-06:00

I did a short article about Urdu a while ago, but it has come to my attention that Kamal Abdali has created a really excellent and comprehensive resource for Urdu on the Mac, which you can find athttp://patriot.net/~abdali/urdumac.html

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-967597015774868552010-05-05T16:29:00.003-06:002010-05-05T16:43:18.057-06:00

Apple's mobile devices are in general still unable to correctly display Unicode Indic scripts like Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Tibetan. But it turns that the Opera Mini browser can solve that problem for web pages by turning the text into a graphic. To activate this feature, you have to type opera:config in the browser address window. A page of settings will then come up, and you go to the very

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-26471090212626646462010-04-14T12:45:00.001-06:002010-04-24T16:56:42.087-06:00

My thanks to Andrew Main for alerting me to a new source for OS X Tibetan fonts and keyboards. If you go to the downloads page on the Tibetan Geeks site and then click on the file "Monlam_bodyig-v.3-macosx.zip", you will get a set of 13 Monlam fonts and 2 keyboard layouts.Also Jomolhari, which seems to work in 10.6 but not in 10.5.These are a welcome addition to the two Tibetan fonts supplied by

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-8725477766033730652010-04-03T14:29:00.031-06:002010-07-29T14:35:54.769-06:00

The iPad became available today. As noted in an earlier article, the language capabilities (listed in the tech specs) are rather less than those on the iPhone/iPod Touch. In particular there is no input for Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and also various European languages (see list here.)iPad Safari and Pages can display all of the missing scripts without problem,

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-6430154950324224262010-03-06T12:24:00.004-07:002010-03-07T06:00:22.602-07:00

Orkhon, or Old Turkic, is a script used by the Göktürks of Inner Asia and first found on inscriptions dating to the 8th century. It is one of the new additions to Unicode 5.2. Emir Yasin Sari has created both a font and a keyboard for Orkhon, which you can download here.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-89768067679838136302010-02-28T13:08:00.009-07:002010-04-15T21:10:03.575-06:00

CSS 3 will eventually include standards for code that tells browsers to temporarily download normal .ttf and .otf fonts needed to display text when they are not present on the machine, and the latest Safari, Chrome, and Firefox browsers already support this feature. Some additional info can be found here.I've seen a report that Mobile Safari (e.g. iPad, iPhone) does not support embedded fonts,

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-61391172926789006242010-02-22T09:19:00.003-07:002010-02-22T09:26:41.808-07:00

MS Word is normally unable to handle Arabic, Hebrew, plus Indic and other complex scripts. But XenoTypeTech has found that with certain fonts Word 2008 for Mac can be used for Tibetan, Khmer, Tai Le, Kannada, and Malayalam. See this page for info.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-27882256338242029932010-02-21T20:04:00.003-07:002010-02-22T09:15:52.571-07:00

Thanks to Alex Ibrado there is a new keyboard layout for Tagalog (also known as Baybayin or Alibata), a pre-Spanish writing system used in the Philippines. You can get it here. OS X does not come with Tagalog fonts, but these should work.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-52310564945039231362010-02-12T07:52:00.006-07:002010-02-22T09:16:31.170-07:00

In an earlier article I noted that Unicode 5.1 added codepoints for Ideographic Variation Sequences (IVS), which can be used to trigger display of glyph variants in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.OS X 10.6 has support for IVS in TextEdit, as described in this recent blog article. All you need is one of the Adobe Pr6N Japanese fonts.Inputting an IVS is not so simple, however, because Character

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-82136000691474883792010-02-11T11:56:00.005-07:002010-02-22T09:16:59.863-07:00

MS has now released info on the new features expected in Office for Mac 2011 here. It's hard to believe, but there is no indication that the much-requested support for Arabic, Hebrew, and Indic scripts has been included.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-2463132156768409632010-02-01T16:25:00.016-07:002010-08-22T04:55:31.311-06:00

Na'vi is the constructed language of the inhabitants of the moon Pandora in the fiction movie Avatar. Though its native speakers have no writing system (as far as we know), Na'vi is represented in Latin script for earthlings' learning purposes.The alphabet is the same as English, except for the accented vowels ì and ä, plus a glottal stop represented by ’ . All of the required characters can be

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-89900763212647230662010-01-27T13:26:00.014-07:002010-03-26T09:19:08.895-06:00

Apple released the tech specs for its new iPad on January 27, and they indicate its language capabilities are somewhat less that those of the iPhone and iPod Touch:Language support for English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, RussianKeyboard support for English (US), English (UK), French (France, Canada), German, Japanese (QWERTY), Dutch, Flemish, Spanish,

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-13326409769989983652010-01-05T17:26:00.004-07:002010-02-22T09:18:21.552-07:00

Considering Google has probably the best online translation site, and the Google Search interface is localized in well over 100 languages, I was thinking the Nexus might have particularly good language support. However it turns out to be much more limited than the iPhone. The tech specs sayDisplay: English (U.S), French (France), German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Italian, Spanish

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-16092002784915524132009-12-27T17:01:00.006-07:002010-02-22T09:19:00.747-07:00

Thanks to Danh Hong a new font for reading/writing Khmer script in OS X is available hereor here. You can find related info in my earlier article.I encourage readers to give the new font a try and let us know if you find any issues. I'm told it will also work right in Word 2008 for Mac if you set the 'enable all ligatures' option under Format/Font/Advanced.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-32519566034207327292009-12-15T10:00:00.002-07:002009-12-20T16:30:36.583-07:00

Sun's free VirtualBox software has made it extremely easy to run Linux concurrently with OS X, and there are various HowTo's on the web (e.g. this one) for doing it. Some reasons this could be useful are a) to use the variety of Windows fonts available for Indic and SE Asian scripts where the Mac only has a couple or none, and b) to use input methods for these scripts which are not yet available

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-29688184543988347382009-12-10T14:09:00.001-07:002009-12-10T14:10:39.688-07:00

Macs normally have one of three different physical keyboard types, which Apple calls JIS (for Japan), ISO (used in Europe, for example) and ANSI (used in the US). ISO has one key more than ANSI -- it is located between z and shift -- and JIS has quite a few differences.Sometimes a machine will forget which type keyboard is attached, with the result that certain keys get transposed from what the

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-4467521562662447412009-12-07T06:51:00.001-07:002009-12-07T06:53:12.965-07:00

TeX is a typesetting software popular in the scientific world for producing high-quality documents. The newest versions support Unicode and opentype fonts and can generate multilingual pdf output. The learning curve is steep, however, because TeX is the opposite of WYSIWYG and the user needs to know a lot of commands.If you want to give it a try, download and install the large or small packages

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-50197350486614965752009-11-24T14:13:00.002-07:002009-11-24T14:17:42.097-07:00

OS X comes with 5 Unicode Braille character fonts. In looking for some way to use them other than input via the Character Palette, which is very cumbersome, I came across this online Braille Converter. Besides English, it also appears to handle more than a dozen other languages.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-77421818937805226742009-11-24T11:45:00.003-07:002009-12-02T09:04:55.819-07:00

In an earlier article I wrote about typing Egyptian Hieroglyphs using non-Unicode systems. Now Unicode version 5.2 includes the Gardiner set of 1071 Hieroglyphs, and you can input them from the Character Palette using the font Aegyptus.For info relating the Unicode set to the Manual de Codage (MdC) system, see this note.I wonder if one could make some kind of useful keyboard IM for these using

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-77866886842337867402009-11-20T16:58:00.006-07:002009-11-20T17:34:42.408-07:00

It was an excellent idea for Apple to include an Arabic - PC keyboard layout in Snow Leopard. But one has to wonder where they got the mapping they used. A poster in the Apple forums pointed out that the character Thal ذ (U+0630) is at an obscure non-standard location (Option/alt + 3) and the character Shadda ّ (U+0651) is not present at all, at least on an ANSI keyboard.Normally, as shown

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-84451008995629234442009-11-16T17:53:00.000-07:002009-11-16T17:56:24.305-07:00

Recently someone asked for a Canadian French keyboard layout, and to my surprise I found that there are at least 3 of them in use, all quite different. Apple provides Canadian French - CSA with OS X, and another one, Canadien Français, with a Quebec flag icon, can be found here. Finally, there is the Canadian French which Apple provided with OS 9. You can get this one from my iDisk.This

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-9731302972693383812009-11-14T12:01:00.003-07:002009-11-14T20:04:50.148-07:00

Originally Mac keyboard layouts came in the form of .rsrc files. Unfortunately these sometimes no longer work in the latest versions of OS X, or don't work for all apps. Thanks to info on the Ukelele site, I've located a way to convert these to the newer .keylayout format.Download and install the Apple Font Tool package from here. Then put your old .rsrc keyboard file in your Home directory,

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-8105889307984585812009-11-13T10:13:00.002-07:002009-11-14T20:05:43.137-07:00

A key feature of the iPhone/iPod Touch is the ability to draw Chinese and Japanese characters on its screen. I don't know how useful this is for creating text, but it is an invaluable replacement for radical/stroke analysis when looking up these characters in a dictionary. For Japanese I am using the app Kotoba and for Chinese DianHua.Other language apps I've found so far that seem especially

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-30836714387846579212009-11-03T14:05:00.002-07:002009-12-15T08:32:52.533-07:00

I've been looking for a way to generate any Unicode character on an iPhone or iPod Touch but have not found an app yet which does this. I tried a variety of charts and virtual keyboards reachable via Safari, and the best one seems to be Macchiato's Character PickerYou can adjust the page size and save it to one of the app screens, and then select the character range that appears on the virtual

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-40582487196696642122009-10-20T17:17:00.002-06:002009-10-20T17:20:49.144-06:00

Google has a service that reformats your blog feed so it is optimal for mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPod Touch. To see this blog on your device, point its browser HEREand make a bookmark or save it to your home screen.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-78431997060120168462009-10-16T15:26:00.000-06:002009-10-16T15:27:36.526-06:00

I get on Twitter sometimes and see what people are saying about Unicode or other topics of interest. You can participate via the web or use one the large number of dedicated apps. Twitter supports Unicode, but some apps are better than others. With Tweetdeck, you need to set the font preferences to International. Neither Tweetdeck nor Seesmic will display complex scripts like Hindi correctly,

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-51247925507808265062009-09-19T07:31:00.005-06:002009-11-14T20:06:30.405-07:00

UK users have long complained about the lack of British English localization (or "localisation") of OS X and Apple apps, but I see that the new iTunes 9 does have one. To activate it you must put British English at the top of the list in System Preferences/Language & Text/Languages.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-903472409118859412009-09-09T14:56:00.003-06:002009-11-14T20:06:54.647-07:00

Apparently a number of Traditional Chinese users find the new font used by Snow Leopard by default for that language (HeiTi TC) to be inferior to that used in Leopard (LiHei Pro). A utility called TCFail has been created to change it back. See this page for info:http://zonble.github.com/tcfail/en.html

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-52788058033369257082009-09-08T05:19:00.005-06:002009-11-14T20:07:28.083-07:00

Thanks to Vinod Prabhakaran for alerting us to the availability of a new, free OS X font and keyboard for Malayalam. You can get it here:http://sites.google.com/site/macmalayalam/Readers who know this script are encouraged to give it a try and provide feedback to its creators.

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-24283510415278010352009-09-03T08:06:00.002-06:002009-09-03T15:49:11.650-06:00

Looking further into Snow Leopard's fonts, I've found a couple of interesting refinements:The character repertoire of Geneva has been expanded considerably. Ranges added are Greek, Ogham, Cyrillic Extensions A and B, plus two blocks from Unicode Plane 1, Ancient Symbols and Old Italic.The new monospaced font Menlo has a broader than expected script coverage, including Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic,

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179600510376940959.post-18904428901509177732009-08-27T19:41:00.009-06:002009-09-19T07:40:09.495-06:00

Here are the new language features I've seen so far in Snow Leopard 10.6.0: 1) Chinese handwriting input is possible for laptops with Multi-Touch trackpads when using Apple Chinese IM's.2) The Chinese Pinyin input method is improved and some new Heiti and Hiragino CJK fonts are provided.3) Polish is included the list of built-in spellcheckers, and you can now add .dic/.aff format dictionaries

Tom Geweckehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947144407429196465noreply@blogger.com33