Tuesday, June 22, 2010

iOS4 Displays Indic Scripts, More Keyboards

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 correctly.

A test page for some scripts is here.

iOS4 provides for using hardware keyboards. As a result, a lot of keyboard layouts have been added to accommodate that, plus various other changes. Here is a complete list.

The Japanese and Chinese IM's have a Custom Dictionary facility so users can create their own pinyin/yomi to hanzi readings. Chinese IM's have a switch to turn on a "fuzzy pinyin" option (but I'm not sure how that works).

The Emoji keyboard choice only works on devices used in Japan (unless you employ special tricks to activate it). But the Japanese and Chinese keyboards have a key which generates a menu of conventional ascii "facemarks".

Switching among keyboards can now be done via a menu that appears when you hold down the "globe" icon.

Voice Control has 24 languages. VoiceOver has 21 and can be set independently of the OS language.

Also see this earlier article.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

What about Khmer?

Tom Gewecke said...

Khmer display is not supported -- just boxes.

Anonymous said...

Forgive my ignorance, but is that only because there is no Khmer font on the iPod or some limitation specifically to Khmer (and Tibetan for that matter).

Tom Gewecke said...

There is no Khmer font, so it just shows boxes. For Tibetan, there is a font, but characters are not stacked correctly.

Anonymous said...

Where can we install the Khmer font on iOS 4? I am stuck with this as all my contact n song are in khmer. :( :( please help

Tom Gewecke said...

iPad, iPhone, iPod are all closed systems. You cannot install any fonts or anything at all which is not provided by the iTunes app store.

Tom Gewecke said...

For those trying to post comments here about ways to install Khmer after jailbreaking, I am not interested in hosting such info on my blog.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3743