Twitter!

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, but Tweetie and Echofon do. Those are the only ones I've tried so far.

Jim DeLaHunt has done a survey of language use on Twitter, check out this page. The top 5 are English, Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, and German.

British English Localizations Coming?

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.

OS X 10.6: Changing Default Font for Trad. Chinese

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

New Malayalam Font for OS X

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.

OS X 10.6: Some Font Improvements

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, and Georgian in addition to the normal Latin. Lao is also present, but about 20 characters seem to be missing.

OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard): New Language Features

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 from other sources (e.g. OpenOffice ). Also you can set the system wide spell checking language without changing the system language itself.

4) The ability to set the keyboard layout as the same for all docs or different for each doc, present in Tiger but omitted in Leopard, has been restored.

5) Bidirectional text (e.g. English/Hebrew) now has system-wide settings for split-cursor, and for RTL, LTR, and Default text directions. (But it looks like RTL problems in iWork/iWeb have not been addressed).

6) VoiceOver is now able to handle all 18 system languages (but only English is provided by Apple).

7) Unicode is upgraded to the latest version (5.1 of 4/4/2008)

8) A "US International - PC" keyboard layout is included, which will be welcomed by Switchers accustomed to using this for W. European languages. (Another has been available on the Web for some time, however.)

9) Hitting Space while holding down Apple/Command will produce a list of active keyboard layouts in the center of the screen, which can be selected via the mouse or the up/down arrows.

10.6 has no new localizations for OS X or any new languages for reading and input.

Also it appears that File > Get Info no longer has a Languages tab, which makes it hard to run an app in a language other than that of the OS. A workaround may be here.

A Hebrew Display Issue

Recently in the Apple Discussions a user had some problems making Hebrew Final Kaf plus Sheva display correctly. Getting this right requires that the font have enough smarts to combine the two characters involved (U+05DA and U+05B0) properly, putting the Sheva inside the Final Kaf instead of just underneath its vertical stroke, as is done elsewhere. Apple's Hebrew Qwerty keyboard layout also requires that you type Shift + k to get Final Kaf rather than just Kaf. This graphic shows how different Hebrew fonts I have on my Leopard system render it in TextEdit. Unfortunately 4 of the 5 supplied by Apple don't do a good job.

Why No Mac Browser Support for Vertical Text?

The ability to display webpage text in vertical format is highly desirable for Chinese, Japanese, and possibly other languages. Recently I checked Safari 4.0.3, FireFox 3.5.2, and Opera 9.64 and found that they still cannot do this in OS X, using this test page.

Same failure for Google Chrome.

I understand that Win IE (starting with version 5.5) is the only browser which has this feature.

Can it really be so difficult?

Braille Output Available in New Languages

Thanks to Archie Robertson there are now free Braille output packages available in French, Norwegian, Danish, German, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew. For info see this page.

New Language Features in Windows 7

MS has announced that Windows 7 will be released in October. This blog article gives info on some of its improvements in the area of internationalization. Notable are a large number of new fonts and some 38 OS localizations.

This page lists the 150+ keyboard layouts apparently available.

OS X 10.6 is apparently staying with the 18 localizations available in 10.5.

New Nastaliq Font For Pro Arabic Script Apps

In an earlier article we provided information on the limited possibilities for displaying Nastaliq-style script in OS X. Recently DecoType, which produces software for top-end Arabic script typography, has released a new font for doing Nastaliq with WinSoft's Tasmeem plug-in for Adobe InDesign ME. Further info can be found here.

Typing Khmer

Khmer is the official language of Cambodia. Currently the only way to read or type this script correctly on a Mac is to acquire the Xenotypetech Language Kit.

Free Khmer fonts for Windows are available here, but various characters will not display properly in OS X. For a free keyboard layout to use with these, download and install NiDA_Khmer_Mac.1.0.keylayout from this site.

If you have a copy of OpenOffice 2.3/2.4 (the one that used X11, not version 3.0), I think windows Khmer fonts may display correctly in that app.

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

See updated article.

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

See updated article.

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.