The Mystery of the Bogus Hebrew

I often field questions on how to get Hebrew to input and display correctly, but rarely does anyone ask me how to get rid of it. The primary example of the latter is a strange problem that occurs with iTunes, where Hebrew replaces normal English in some circumstances. You can see an example here.

I've never been able to figure out the details of why this occurs, but the cure, which someone else found by chance, is normally to remove any copies of the font Lucida Grande.ttf (NOT Lucida Grande.dfont) found on your machine.

Solving a Cyrillic Puzzle

Recently someone in the Apple forums had a problem with text he knew was in Russian but which would only display in Latin. It was just one word, "Dybvfybt". Since no encoding currently used for Cyrillic maps this script to ASCII, the text must have been made with some kind of custom font that did just that. But normally anyone making such a font would map the Cyrillic characters to their Latin equivalent, so the text should be recognizable as transliterated Russian, which it wasn't.

This stumped me, until I wondered whether someone had made a font designed especially to allow typing according to the standard Russian keyboard layout but on a Western keyboard. Instead of the QWERTY used in the U.S., the Russian layout goes YTsUKEN. Sure enough, typing Dybvfybt according to my U.S. keyboard, but with the layout set to Russian, produced a recognizable word, Внимание = Vnimanie = Attention.

It's the first time I've seen Cyrillic text encoded that way, and I haven't yet found an available font that supports it.

Typing Kyrgyz

Kyrgyz is a Turkic language spoken in Kyrgyzstan and a few other areas. While both the Arabic and Latin scripts have been used to write it in the past, Cyrillic is now the standard. The alphabet is essentially the same as Russian but with 3 additional characters: Ң, Ү, Ө.

OS X comes with fonts that cover Kyrgyz, but with no keyboard layout. On my Dropbox you can find two versions: KyrgyzCYR, which is the same as used on Windows machines, and KyrgyzPH, which is modeled on the Apple Russian-Phonetic layout and may be easier for people used to QWERTY. The extra three characters are found on the Option and Option + Shift levels for н, у, and о.


https://www.dropbox.com/s/8bzhohfnplb6umw/KyrgyzCYR.keylayout?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bd6h9p7gqbr8rj2/KyrgyzPH.keylayout?dl=0


Switching from Cyrillic back to Latin (which was used for a number of years before 1940) is reportedly being considered.

Pitfalls of Working with Complex Scripts

It's not unusual to have to do publishing or design work in languages and scripts you do not understand. In some scripts, if you use the wrong font or app, you can easily generate nonsense without realizing it. So having a native speaker (or at least someone who knows the script) check things can be important. Below are some examples of common pitfalls you may run into. In particular, be aware that MS Word for Mac, even the 2008 version, does not yet support correct display of these scripts.

Arabic script, used for many other languages than just Arabic, can wind up disconnected or backwards.

Indic scripts, used for example in Hindi/Sanskrit, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Tamil, and Tibetan can easily wind up with letters in the wrong order, overlapping, or uncombined (when combination is mandatory).

Thai and other S.E. Asian languages don't use spaces to separate words, so line breaking can occur in totally wrong places. Apple Cocoa apps can access a dictionary built into OS X that enables them to do Thai line breaking fairly well, but MS, Adobe, and other apps cannot.

Typing Catalan

Catalan is a co-official language along with Spanish in the region on the Eastern edge of Spain. It uses the same alphabet as Spanish except it has no ñ and adds the digraph l·l (ela geminada).

OS X 10.3 had a Catalan keyboard layout which was identical to Spanish-ISO except for the flag icon. This seems to be no longer present in my 10.4. From my iDisk you can download the Catalan folder, which contains the .keylayout file and the .icns file with the right flag. The layout is almost the same as Spanish-ISO. The middle dot · (U+00B7) which is the standard for producing l·l is at shift + 3. But also included are ŀ (U+0140) and Ŀ (U+013F) at option + o and option + shift + o, in case you want to use these versions for local printing or similar purposes.

Typing Kazakh

Kazakh is a Turkic language spoken in Kazakhstan and a few other areas. While both the Arabic and Latin scripts have been used to write it in the past, Cyrillic is now the standard. The alphabet is essentially the same as Russian but with 9 additional characters: Ә, Ғ, Қ, Ң, Ө, Ұ, Ү, Һ, І.

OS X comes with fonts that cover Kazakh, but with no keyboard layout. On my iDisk you can find two versions: KazakhCYR, which is the same as used on Windows machines, and KazakhPH, which is modeled on the Apple Russian-Phonetic layout and may be easier for people used to QWERTY.

Switching from Cyrillic back to Latin (which was used for a number of years before 1940) is reportedly under consideration by Kazakhstan.

Publishing with Complex Scripts

Those wishing to do serious desktop publishing, including books, in scripts like Arabic, Devanagari, or Tamil in OS X are handicapped by the fact that standard applications like Word, InDesign, and Quark cannot yet render OS X Unicode fonts for these languages correctly. Alternatives are the limited TextEdit or Pages (which is buggy for Arabic), or using Windows fonts with OpenOffice. There does exist a special ME version of InDesign for Arabic/Hebrew.

Recently I came across a DTP program called iCalamus that appears to combine a wide range of DTP capabilities with proper rendering of complex scripts. Users with this kind of requirement may want to download the free trial here and give it a try. Unfortunately iCalamus does not yet support direct input and editing of Indic -- you have to copy/paste your text from TextEdit or another app where this can be done. A somewhat similar app which does support direct input is Create.

Typing Hawaiian

OS X includes a special keyboard layout for the Hawaiian Language (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi), which puts the macron vowels which it uses (ā ē ī ō ū) on the Option key of the normal letter. This layout also replaces the normal apostrophe (') with the Unicode "modifier letter turned comma" ʻ (U+02BB) used by Hawaiian to represent the glottal stop (ʻokina). ( For the normal apostrophe you can type Option + ', and for the left single you you type for Option + ] )

If you put ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi at the top of the list in System Preferences/International/Languages you may be surprised at how your files sort by name, since they will follow the order of the Hawaiian alphabet, with the English letters Hawaiian doesnʻt use tacked on at the end: a e i o u h k l m n p w ʻ b c d f g j q r s t v x y z.

New Fonts for Arabic Script Languages

Because of the different technologies used by Mac's and PC's for complex scripts (AAT and OpenType respectively), it has long been necessary to use different fonts on the two platforms for languages written in Arabic script. Also AAT fonts are uncommon, so Arabic script on a Mac (unless you used particular apps like Mellel or OpenOffice) was essentially limited to the Geeza Pro font supplied with OS X and two fonts (Scheherazade and Lateef) provided by SIL.

Thanks to the Iranian Mac User Group (IRMUG), there is now available a new set of Arabic script fonts, XBZar, which contain both technologies and should thus display the same on both platforms and in all applications that support Unicode. XBZar, which has regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic typefaces, can be downloaded here.

Tiger (but not Panther) has some bugs that cause problems with this font. If you have an Intel Mac, you must be running 10.4.9 for it to work right. On a PPC Mac, 10.4.2 is sufficient.

For more info on typing Arabic script languages, see this page.

Typing Etruscan

Etruscan is an ancient extinct language that preceded Latin in Italy and whose writing system is one of earliest examples of the English alphabet. This script is in Unicode under the name "Old Italic." MPH 2B Damase and Code2001 are free fonts that cover it, and a keyboard layout can be downloaded from my iDisk or here.

Etruscan was often written right-to-left, and the fonts mentioned above reflect this direction in the way the letters are oriented. To input this correctly you should use the application Mellel, set for RTL. An alternative is to use another Unicode-savvy app like TextEdit, but precede your text with the Unicode character 202E to force the correct direction. The keyboard on my iDisk has 202E on the ` key and 202C (used to end an RTL segment) on the = key. These should also be used in web pages, but not all browsers may display the correct direction.

Here is an Etruscan Test Page.

Reading Cuneiform

Cuneiform is a script used to write a number of languages of the ancient Middle East, such as Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite. Since version 5.0 Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform is part of Unicode, but until recently there have not been any fonts publically available. Now you can download one for the Hittite version of the script here.

Cuneiform was used for such a variety of languages over such a long period that the form of its glyphs showed considerable evolution over time and place. Thus different fonts are required to correctly display the forms used in Neo Sumerian (which appear in the Unicode charts), and those used in Old, Middle, and New Babylonian and Assyrian, Hittite or Elamite.

The only way to input Cuneiform at present is via the Character Palette or copy/paste.

Here are some test pages for Hittite, Akkadian, and Sumerian.

Different, alphabetic cuneiform scripts are also used for Old Persian and Ugaritic. For info on fonts and keyboards for these, see the blog entries for Unicode 4.1 and Unicode 4.0.

Typing Romanian in Word

Recently in the Apple forums a user complained that he couldn't do Romanian in MS Word 2004 using the standard fonts Arial and Times New Roman. At first I was puzzled, since MS specifically provides special enlarged versions of these fonts with Word that contain Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and Vietnamese in addition to more common Latin languages. But sure enough, when I looked more closely, I found that Version 3.05 of Arial and Times New Roman are missing the letters s-comma and t-comma required by Romanian.

It turns out that updated versions of these fonts with the Romanian characters added are available to WinXP users via download from MS since Dec. 2006, and that the new versions are also automatically included in WinVista. Unless you can get copies of these, you'll have to use other fonts for Romanian in OS X -- Courier, Geneva, Helvetica, Hoefler, Lucida Grande, Monaco, Palatino, and Times should all work, along with various downloadable fonts that cover the whole Latin range, like Doulos, Gentium, Charis, and Everson Mono.

See this article for another issue relating to Romanian in OS X.

More Ways to Type Spanish

If you want to type Spanish on your Mac and are used to Windows, you may run into problems figuring out which keys to use for accented characters and the inverted punctuation marks. That's because, out of the 6 commonly-used Spanish keyboard layouts provided on the two platforms, only two (Mac Spanish ISO and Windows Spanish) are the same. How this situation came about, I have no idea. You can see graphics comparing the six here.

My understanding is that many Spanish users prefer the Windows US International or Latin American layouts. For the US International layout, a version can be downloaded from this page, and for Latin American (winlatinamerican.keylayout) you can go to my iDisk.

Of course you can also type Spanish on the normal US layout: The deadkey for the acute accent is Option + e and for the tilde it is Option + n, with ¿ at Option + Shift + / and ¡ at Option + 1.

Fixing the Brazilian Keyboard Layout

If you try to type Brazilian Portuguese, you might be puzzled by the OS X keyboard layout that comes with the Brazilian flag attached to it. It's neither Portuguese nor Brazilian, but simply the normal US layout, where you type accented characters using Option deadkeys.

As I understand it, Brazilians are used to typing with a layout called ABNT or with the layout called US International PC. You can get an ABNT layout (winbrazabnt.keylayout) here.

Missing Vietnamese Characters?

If you are having trouble browsing Unicode Vietnamese web pages, like the BBC Vietnamese site, seeing boxes or question marks instead of characters with two diacritics, it probably means you need an extra font. The problem arises because certain Vietnamese sites stipulate the use of the Arial font in their html code, but the Arial (2.60) that comes with OS X 10.4 does not contain the precomposed Vietnamese characters in the Latin Extended Additional Unicode block. Most people do not notice a problem, because at some point they installed a trial or other version of MS Office2004, which puts a more complete version of Arial (3.05) in your Home/Library/Fonts folder. If you *do* have missing characters, try to find a copy of this font for your machine.

Typing Yoruba

Yoruba is one of the major languages of Nigeria, and many speakers have also emigrated to the UK, Brazil, and the US. It is written with the normal English alphabet plus a few extra "dotted" letters: Ẹ/ẹ, Ọ/ọ, Ṣ/ṣ. Also tone marks are required, grave ` for low and acute ´ for high. Lucida Grande is probably the best font to use.

The dotted letters can be made with the US Extended keyboard layout, using Option + x, followed by the base letter. Tones can then be added using Option + Shift + ` and Option + Shift + e. You can also download a custom Yoruba keylayout from my iDisk. This puts the dotted letters on the 1, 2, and 3 keys and all the vowels are deadkeys. You type the vowel and then choose a) 4 for grave accent/low tone, b) 5 for acute accent/high tone, and c) any other key for no accent/mid tone. The Naira symbol is on the = key. This layout also has the special characters needed for Hausa and Igbo (Ɓ ɓ Ɗ ɗ Ƙ ƙ Ƴ ƴ Ṅ ṅ Ị ị Ụ ụ).

Typing Hausa

Hausa is an official language in northern Nigeria and widely used in other Muslim areas of West Africa as well. The standard Latin orthography uses the normal English alphabet, plus the hooked letters Ɓ ɓ Ɗ ɗ Ƙ ƙ Ƴ ƴ. Of the fonts included with OS X, only Lucida Grande has these, but others can be downloaded. In addition, some publications have used a dot underneath instead of the hooked letters, and some dictionaries and teaching aids may also mark vowel length using a macron ¯ and vowel tones using grave ` (low), acute ´ (high), and circumflex ˆ (falling).

All of these can be made using the US Extended keyboard layout, a chart for which is here. The hooked letters are made using Option + Shift + . (period), followed by the base letter. Another solution is to use the custom Hausa keyboard layout from my iDisk. The hooked letters are located on the Option version of the base letter.

Hausa has also been written in Arabic script, and examples of that can be found on Nigerian banknotes.

Blog Widget Available

For anyone who wishes to have access this this blog via a Dashboard Widget, you can download one here.

Translating To and From Foreign Languages

Mac OS has long provided a language translation facility, first via Sherlock and, starting with OS X 10.4, the Translation Widget in Dashboard. In both cases there is no translation application on your machine: Sherlock and the Widget are simply interfaces to an online translation service, in this case Systran, which can also be accessed via any web browser.

Anyone who uses this to translate foreign text into his native language will quickly see the limitations. Relying on it to translate your native language into one you don't yourself know, in the expectation of making yourself correctly understood, is not realistic. The reasons for that lie in the inherent shortcomings of Machine Translation. Only humans can really do it right.

For alternatives to what comes with OS X, there is a good list here. Some worth checking out are LiveDictionary, WordLookup, TranslateIt, Google's Language Tools, and Langenburg.com, which is a gateway to multiple services.

For translation software that runs on your Mac rather than via the Internet, there is NeuroTran and InteractiveTran. For your iPod, you can try iLingo.

Future Additions to Unicode?

There are various languages, scripts, and characters which have not yet made it into the Unicode standard. If you are interested in where something stands in that regard, the best resource is the Proposed New Scripts page at Unicode.org. There you will currently find about 4 dozen in 4 categories -- Exploratory Stage, Committee Review, ISO Balloting, and Pre-Publication. Another useful page is the Roadmaps of proposed allocations of Unicode codepoints. If you want to see what characters might be added to existing scripts, the right place to look is the Character Pipeline.

Typing Traditional Mongolian

See updated article at

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2013/03/reading-and-typing-traditional.html

Support for Dravidian Languages

The Dravidian languages, which form a group apparently unrelated to any other, are spoken in Southern India and in Sri Lanka. OS X 10.4 comes with support for Tamil, and you can find info on how to use it here. For typing in the other main family members -- Kannada, Malayalam, and Telegu -- you need to download and install fonts and keyboards, using either the commercial kits available from XenoTypeTech or the free stuff listed below:

For Kannada, you can get the Kedage font and a keyboard layout from Nick Shanks' site.

For Malayalam, you can get the Rachana font and a keyboard from the MacMalayalam Site.

For Telugu, use the Pothana font from Nick Shanks and the keyboard layout from my iDisk.

Web sites in these languages may still be using custom encodings instead of Unicode. In that case you will need to download whatever font they require (e.g. manorama for manoramaonline.com) and you may need to try different browsers as well.

Windows Vista Internationalization

With the official release of Windows Vista, the MS pages giving info on international support have been updated here.

To see keyboard layouts, I think you need to use either the old IE for Mac or Opera, as neither Safari nor Firefox seem to display them.

Typing Kurdish

Kurdish (كوردی) is the official language of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and ever-increasing amounts of Kurdish text are being produced in Arabic script. While OS X 10.4 does not include a Kurdish keyboard layout, there is one you an download on my iDisk. A large number of free kurdish fonts have recently been made available from KurdITGroup. Unfortunately these are for Windows, but you should be able to use them correctly on a Mac with the applications Mellel or OpenOffice. For other apps, the normal OS X default font, Geeza Pro, probably does not do totally correct Kurdish orthography, and it is better to use one of the SIL fonts, Lateef AAT or Scheherazade AAT.

Want Your Browser in Your Own Language?

For most people, the web browser is the most frequently used piece of software, and having it in one's native language would be nice. Different browsers offer different possibilities in that regard. Safari comes with the 15 localizations standard in OS X, and you may be able to find other non-official versions by searching MacUpdate. Opera offers the same 15. FireFox has the best selection, with over 3 dozen localizations available, including Arabic, Hebrew, Basque, Kurdish, Mongolian, Greek, Russian, Georgian, Lithuanian, Punjabi, and Turkish. OmniWeb has only Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese and Swedish. Camino has Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish. Mozilla Suite has Traditional Chinese, French, German, Polish, Swedish, and Turkish. iCab has 8 of the OS X languages plus Russian. Netscape and AOL seem to be only in English.

Translation and Localization Tools

If you are a professional translator using a Mac, you may be interested in tools for CAT (Computer Assisted Translation). One of these is a specialized word processor that makes provision for keeping source and target text carefully organized and has a "translation memory" to automatically help the translator use earlier work to process new text. Two such applications for OS X users are AppleTrans and OmegaT. An excellent survey of the field can be found at the Wikipedia CAT page.

One important area for translation work is the localization of OS X applications, i.e. providing the means for the menus and dialogues of a program to be displayed in the user's native language. For this special tools are required to extract and replace the parts of the application containing the texts. Apple provides the programs AppleGlot and ADViewer for this purpose. There are also 3rd-party alternatives including LocFactoryEditor, iLocalize, and Localization Suite.

Spell-Checking in Other Languages

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, elementary education drilled correct spelling into you so throughly it was hard to forget it. These days computer spell-checking allows those brain cells to be used for other tasks. OS X comes with spell-checking for Australian, British, and Canadian English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Swedish. (Note: Leopard adds Danish and Russian.) But what if you need a different language?

CocoAspell is one answer. First you install it, then download the dictionary you want from the list of several dozen. Decompress the file with Stuffit Expander, then just put the resulting folder in /Library/Application Support/cocoAspell/. Enable your dictionary by going to System Preferences/Spelling (a new item created by CocoAspell).

Another option for Hebrew is Hebrew Spelling Service. For Finnish you can try Soikko.

A commercial alternative is SpellCatcher X, which has a dictionary/thesaurus for English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Danish.

Getting Your Mac to Speak Other Languages

OS X includes excellent text-to-speech capabilities, activated in System Preferences/Speech/Text-To-Speech or doing Command + F5 to turn on VoiceOver (System Preferences/Universal Access/Seeing/VoiceOver). Unfortunately the supplied voices only do English. Users who need other languages need to acquire third-party voices and sometimes use non-Apple applications.

Speechissimo and Cepstral offer French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

AssistiveWare has several different products. TextParrot offers French, German, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Swedish. For more features, there are Infovox iVox, VisoVoice, and Proloquo.
The application Key5 has a Chinese text-to-speech module.

DTalker is said to be able to do Japanese text-to-speech.

OS X 10.5 Leopard, to be released the spring of 2007, is expected to include expanded support for foreign language add-on speech synthesizers, including Chinese and Japanese.

Advanced Japanese Input

Japanese is no doubt one of the most complex of all languages to write, since it can use no less that four different scripts: Kanji (Chinese characters), Hiragana, Katakana, and Latin.

The Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries play an especially important role, because their Latin equivalents are used for Japanese computer input (with subsequent conversion to Kanji as appropriate) via a Latin keyboard, and they are also used to represent the pronunciation of non-Japanese words or possibly unfamiliar Kanji.

There are well over 150 kana syllables which can be created by the Mac Kotoeri Japanese Input Method, some fairly rare, and info on how to make all of them is buried in the Japanese-only Kotoeri Help. Anyone who needs this in more usable form can find a copy of the list here, which you can enlarge in your browser or drag onto your desktop to print for reference.

Typing Navajo

Navajo uses the Latin letters of English plus a number of extras that make it not that easy to render in ordinary print: Łł Ńń Áá Éé Íí Óó Ąą Ęę Įį Ǫǫ Ą́ą́ Ę́ę́ Į́į́ Ǫ́ǫ́. The last four do not have any precomposed version in Unicode, which means some apps will probably not place the two required diacritics quite correctly. In addition, Navajo makes heavy use of the glottal stop character, ʼ , which should probably best be represented by the modifier letter apostrophe (U+02BC). Some people have used the ascii apostrophe (U+0027) or the right single quote (U+2019) instead, but these are punctuation marks rather than real letters and it is better to avoid them.

Typing Navajo can be done using the US Extended keyboard layout in OS X. The glottal stop ʼ is made via Option + i, then space.

To type Navajo on an iOS device, download the Keyman app from the app store.

Navajo characters (with the addition of ṉ) can also be used for the closely related language Western Apache.

For an example of Navajo text, see this copy of a 1956 school reader.

For an example of Navajo on the Web, see here.

For a specialized keyboard, try Languagegeek's.

Typing in the International Phonetic Alphabet

See more recent article here.

Multilingual iPhone?

Watching the very impressive demo of the new Apple iPhone, I was wondering whether the version of OS X (as well as the email client and the browser) incorporated in it will support the same multilingual features that 10.4 does. I haven't seen any mention of this in reports from MacWorld or elsewhere so far. It would be cool to point the browser at a test site like this one and see what all can at least be displayed.

Typing Tagbanwa

Tagbanwa is a language spoken by a few thousand people in the Philippines. Although its script became part of Unicode with version 3.2, only recently do we have a font, thanks to Samuel Thibault. You can also find an OS X keyboard for Tagbanwa on my iDisk.

Your Multilingual iPod

While the iPod still lacks the capability to display Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, and various other complex scripts, it is fully Unicode-savvy for the 28 languages that are listed in its tech specs. You can display all of them on a single page of plain text as long as it is encoded in UTF-16. If you want to be able to demonstrate this for yourself, download the file ipodlangs16.txt from my iDisk, and put it in the Notes folder of your iPod. This is a selection from the UTF-8 Sampler Page, which provides the phrase "I can eat glass and it doesn't hurt me" in many languages.

The iPod can also display multilingual text in UTF-8 encoding as long as the text starts with a BOM (Byte Order Mark). TextEdit does not create UTF-8 with a BOM, so you need to save the text with a program like TextWranger which has that option. If you are curious about what a BOM does, see here.

iPod notes can only be 4K in length, but you can break longer texts into pieces of the right size with links from page to page using a program like Book2Pod.

Comparing MS Windows Internationalization

Info on the current relatively good state of OS X localization can be found here. MS Win XP has, by contrast, only been available to consumers in one language at a time. But Win Vista, which should be out at the end of January, 2007, promises a new Multilingual User Interface (MUI) which is likely to equal OS X capabilities and also go further by adding Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish, Greek, and possibly more. On the other hand, the new MUI will apparently only be provided with Vista Ultimate (retail price $400) and not with the cheaper Home Basic, Home Premium, and Business editions.

A list of various types of Vista language packs and input keyboards can be found here.

As for the Zune, I understand that its current software only does Latin script, which makes the device very limited indeed compared to the iPod.

Typing Multilingual Text in Terminal

I personally don't have much need to read/write Unicode in OS X's Unix command-line environment, but some people do find this useful or essential. Whether you can get it work satisfactorily depends on the languages and apps you are using and probably also on the fonts you have. Getting started involves setting Terminal's preferences correctly and creating .inputrc and .profile files in your Home directory to change the bash shell default behavior. Details on how to do this can be found here. That may be enough for some purposes. If not, some suggestions for further refinements are here.

????'s When You Post in a Forum With Safari?

Someone in the Apple discussions asked why his Greek and Cyrillic postings in another forum turned into question marks when he used Safari but displayed correctly when he used FireFox.

This occurs because some forums have the encoding of their web pages set to Latin-1 even though it is understood that members will post in languages that cannot be covered by that charset. When that is the case, a non-Latin character has to be converted into a "Numerical Character Reference (NCR)" escape code. For example, Greek Alpha α becomes &#945, where the number is the Unicode code point (decimal) for the character. This is essentially an html kludge developed for the situation years ago when computer and internet technology was so limited that the only safe way to display non-Latin characters was to convert them to such ASCII-only codes.

It happens that FireFox, when faced with a page where the encoding is totally wrong for the characters being input, will automatically produce these NCR's instead of the real character. Safari does not do that, so what it puts into the forum appears as question marks when viewed as Latin-1.

If you must use Safari, download/install UnicodeChecker, set its Preferences/XHTML to Decimal, and use it to convert your non-Latin text into NCR's before posting. This can be done by selecting the text and going to Safari > Services > Unicode > Unicode to HTML Entities.

Forums intended to accommodate languages beyond English and those of W. Europe should, if at all possible, have the encoding UTF-8 and not Latin-1. The Apple forums themselves are a good example of the correct approach, where Safari works perfectly to input any language you want.

Foreign Language Broadcasts via Internet

For listening to foreign language news and other broadcasts, internet radio is taking the place that used to be occupied by short-wave listening for many people. A Google search will quickly bring you to the web pages of a huge number of stations that offer listening to their live broadcasts in RealAudio, WindowsMedia, or other formats. If you want a more systematic way of doing this, I recommend the Reciva Radio Portal, which has over 5000 stations in its database and lets you create customized lists of the ones you want to listen to.

For something more radio-like, check out the AE Wifi Internet Radio, which is essentially a small dedicated computer that connects to the Reciva Portal over your local wireless network. It's available from various sources in the U.S. I got one for Christmas and it works beautifully.

Writing Phags-Pa

Phags-pa is a script once used for Mongolian and Chinese and occasionally today for Tibetan. Andrew West has just produced a font for this which can be downloaded here. A keyboard layout for OS X which mirrors Andrew's version for Windows can be gotten from my iDisk.

Unfortunately as far as I can tell neither OS X nor X11 apps can yet display Phags-pa totally correctly, only Windows. Here is a test page.

Update Nov. 2007: OS X 10.5 Leopard can display Phags-pa correctly in Safari and Pages, but not in TextEdit.

Where Is The Romanian S-Comma?

A Mac user in California asked today where they could find the ș (s-comma) needed for Romanian in the OS X keyboard layout for that language. The answer is that this character happens to be on a key which does not exist on keyboards sold in the US (known as ANSI or 101 keyboards), but only on keyboards sold in Europe (known as ISO or 102).

The solution is to download and install an alternative Romanian layout. Two sources for one can be found here.

How could Apple do this? I don't have the details, but I think it may be because Macs sold in Romania have a physical keyboard labeled for use in more than one country/language in the region, which required some compromises in key placement. The ș wound up on the extra key, and the layout provided with OS X has to follow that, so Romanians in Romania can type their own language.

Problems Using PC Keyboards?

Recently someone was trying to type on his Mac with a PC Arabic keyboard and reported that the layout did not match what OS X was using. Unfortunately that's true for a lot of languages other than US English -- Mac and PC keyboards may have somewhat different layouts, and OS X only has software for the Mac versions. Since the creation of the Mac Mini more people seem to be using PC keyboards.

The solution is to install custom layouts that match the PC models. On my iDisk you can find some for Arabic, Russian, Azeri, Urdu, Mongolian, and Tamil. For various European languages, you can get layouts that may work better with PC keyboards from Logitech, as explained here. Beyond that, you can use Ukelele to make your own.

Macedonian Keyboard Error

Yesterday a poster in the Apple Forums pointed out that the Macedonian keyboard layout supplied by Apple has a mistake in it, where the character з (U+0437) has been replaced by э (U+044D). The uppercase version is OK, however. Also the layout has as deadkey which does not belong there. A corrected keyboard, Macedonianz.keylayout, is available on my iDisk.

I checked the Panther layout and found the same errors. It seems strange I've never seen this reported earlier. Is it possible that before now no one has used OS X to type Macedonian since Panther was released?

Writing Ancient Egyptian

The most common ways of representing Ancient Egyptian are hieroglyphs and their Latin transcription.

The total number of hieroglyphs, for example recorded in Hieroglyphica, is nearly 7000. They have not yet been put in Unicode, though a proposal to cover a basic set of about 1200 of them is in the works. In the meantime, the solution is to use custom non-Unicode fonts along with special editing programs that let you arrange the symbols in the various ways they are found naturally. On OS X, MacScribe can be used for this. An example of how it works can be seen here.

For Latin transcription alone, Unicode is possible. The most common standard alphabet currently used has 24 letters (all consonents, no vowels):

ȝ ỉ y ʿ w b p f m n r h ḥ ḫ ẖ s š ḳ k g t ṯ d ḏ

10 of these are not found in English. They can all be entered via the Character Palette in OS X, but it is a lot easier to use a custom keyboard, such as the EgyptTrans.keylayout you can download from my iDisk. There are also transcription systems which use only ASCII, such as found in the Manuel de Codage. MacScribe uses a system like this for input.

Egyptian was also written in the hieratic and demotic scripts and in Coptic. For the first two I am unaware of any Unicode proposals or fonts, but Coptic is in Unicode 4.1 and you can download a Coptic2005.keylayout from my iDisk. You also need one of the fonts that covers Coptic -- ALPHABETUM Unicode, Code2000, MPH 2B Damase, or New Athena Unicode.

Writing Esperanto

Esperanto is the most popular of various artificial languages, invented in 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof. For good info, check out the Wikipedia article.

Esperanto uses essentially the same alphabet as English, but with the extra letters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ. To type these in OS X, you can activate the the US Extended keyboard layout in System Preferences/International/Input menu. The letters with the ^ (circumflex) over them can be typed by doing Option + 6 followed by the letter itself. The ŭ (u-breve) is made by doing Option + b followed by u.

You can also download an Esperanto keyboard layout from my iDisk, which will let you type the special letters more easily (the accented characters are at Option + the base character).

Typing Tifinagh

Tifinagh is a script used for some Berber languages, in particular Tamazight in Morocco. For more info see this page. An experimental keyboard, Tifinagh.keylayout, is available on my iDisk.

Fonts which contain Tifinagh include Code2000, Hapax Berbère, Hapax Touareg, Hapax Touareg DàG, MPH 2B Damase.

Typing Shavian

Shavian is a script named after G. B. Shaw designed to represent English with simple, phonetic characters. For more info see this page. "Shavian" written in Shavian looks like this:



There are only three fonts that contain the Unicode Shavian range, Code2001, Andagii, and MPH 2B Damase. For input I have made an experimental Shavian.keylayout available on my iDisk.

Typing Mongolian (Cyrillic)

Mongolian Cyrillic uses the same alphabet as Russian, but with two extra characters, Өө and Үү. Unfortunately these are not included as options in any of the Cyrillic keyboard layouts included with OS X, so you need to use the Character Palette or install a custom layout. You can download a MongolianCYR and MongolianQWERTY layouts that do have them here.

Lucida Grande is the only font that comes with OS X that has the two extra characters. If you have Office2004, then the Arial, Monaco, Times, and Times New Roman that come with it should also work. Others you can download are Everson Mono, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Code2000, and Gandhari Unicode. Some MS Office Chinese fonts have them, but these are double-width.

Some users have reported that the keyboard works in every app except MS Word. If that is a problem for you, try typing some Mongolian in another app and then copy/pasting into Word. This may force it to recognize the keyboard.

Typing Yi/Lolo

Yi (or Lolo) is spoken by 4-5 million people in SW China and is written using 1165 characters representing individual syllables. For some interesting info, including lists of the syllables and sample text, see the Babelstone Yi Page.

The logical way to type Yi is with an input method like those used for pinyin Chinese. OS X includes a facility for creating custom IM's, so I made an experimental one for Yi. You type in the Latin letters for the syllable, hit return, and the right character is placed in your text.

To install this IM, download the file yi16.txt.dat from my iDisk. Then use the "Generate IM Plug-in" command in the Traditional Chinese input method menu, and select Yi in the latter. If you are using something earlier than Tiger, you follow a different procedure -- see this page for details.

For Unicode Sanskrit, Try OpenOffice

Doing Unicode Sanskrit in OS X apps like TextEdit or Pages faces two problems: You are restricted to the one font Devanagari MT, and this font cannot do some conjunct forms or handle the stress marks for Vedic texts correctly. My tests indicate that the app OpenOffice/X11 (not OpenOffice 3) can use Windows fonts to display correct Devanagari and some of these, like Sanskrit 2003, will position stress marks as they should be and also create proper conjuncts. A screenshot of the first line of the Rig Veda showing the stress marks can be found here.

Aurabesh?

Aurabesh is not a language or script, but an alternative alphabet for English which is used in the Star Wars Saga. It is not in Unicode and never will be, but you can play with it by downloading a font like this one, and using it while typing normally with the US keyboard layout. My name in Aurabesh looks like this:



Here is some more info.