Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Reading and Writing Georgian

Georgian was made part of Unicode over 10 years ago. Though OS X has never included fonts or keyboards for this script, some have been available via downloading from the internet to enable a basic level of support. Thanks to Reno Siradze there is now a much more advanced and refined set of tools for Georgian, which you can get here:

Georgian Language Kit 1.0

For more good Georgian fonts, try BPG-InfoTech

Note that it is customary in Georgian headings, ads, captions, and titles to use a special capitalized version of the normal unicameral alphabet (called the Didi style of Mkhedruli or the Mtavruli style of Mkhedruli). Inputting this style requires switching to a special font, although some fonts like those from BPG put this type style in the 10A0 range in place of what is supposed to be there.

Note Added Later: OS X 10.5 Leopard does include one font with Georgian, namely Arial Unicode.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Where to Get Hardware Keyboards in Other Languages

If the physical keyboard on your Mac does not have the layout/language you want, here is place that sells Apple international keyboards:

Laptops

USB

Saturday, July 7, 2007

iPhone: How to Send Email in Other Languages

No doubt Apple will eventually update the iPhone OS to included keyboards that enable input beyond the current ASCII English. But pending that it's possible, with a skillful combination of javascript vitual keyboards and the html "mailto" function, to create online keyboards that let you send email from the iPhone in a variety of languages. For an example, see this app

Virtual Keyboards

which can do French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Greek, Brazilian, and Swedish.