iPhone Language Features Limited in First Version

I don't have an iPhone, but reports from users confirm that the OS in the device released June 29 has language capabilities that fall short of those in OS X Tiger. The user interface and keyboard input are English only. Text display in the browser (presumably the same as in email and other apps) includes W. European, E. European, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. But no font is provided for Vietnamese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai, or Tamil, all of which are part of the full Tiger OS, or Tibetan, rumored to be added in Leopard. This particular iPhone is, of course, intended only for the US market.

A photo of a language test page can be seen here.

Multilingual iCal

If you would like to have the months and days of the week in another language in the calendars of iCal, go to System Preferences/International/Formats and change the Region to the language of your choice. Check the Show All Regions box to add more languages if you want. When iCal restarts the names should be changed. What might surprise you is that this can be done even in languages for which OS X has no localization, e.g. Arabic. Display will not be correct, however, for languages where you do not have an appropriate font installed.

Browser Language Test

Since the new Windows Safari beta has a number of bugs related to non-ascii text, and there also remain many questions about what the Safari used in the iPhone will be able to display, I have posted a simple web page that contains short samples of the scripts which often cause problems here.

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/ltp.html

At the bottom of this page there is a graphic of what should be seen at the top, so users can easily compare the two and see what may not be displaying right.

Tiger should display everything correctly except Tibetan (unless you have installed the special font from XenotypeTech). Leopard comes with a Tibetan font and should also display that sample in proper fashion.

Some Tiger Versions Have Russian Localization

Russian is not listed in the Tiger tech specs as an available localization, and neither my retail PPC install nor updates to 10.4.9 have it. But I recently got an Intel iMac with 10.4.7, and this does in fact include Russian as an option for menus and dialogues. I would assume all versions of Leopard should have this.

Unicode 5 Now Online

The full text of the latest version of the Unicode Standard can now be found here.