Magic Trackpad Does Chinese Handwriting Input

Although Apple totally fails to mention it, the new Magic Trackpad will do Chinese Handwriting input just like the multitouch trackpad of certain Apple laptops. The July 29 report here may be of use to people who want to try it.

Update 8/13/2010: Apple has now documented this feature here.

As with the laptop feature, Japanese is not supported.

Alternatives for Missing iPad Keyboards

As of 11/1/2010, the iPad app store lists keyboards for Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese, Greek, Korean, Dvorak, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish, Czech, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Icelandic, Finnish, Serbian (Cyr), Serbian (Latin), Catalan, Macedonian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, and Pashto.

Viewing Non-Unicode Indic Language Web Sites

A good number of Indic language web sites have not yet converted to Unicode, but still require custom fonts and are designed to work only with special dynamic font support available in the Windows IE browser. Viewing them on a Mac can be tedious, since you have to find and install the font used by the site and then hope a Mac browser will recognize it. An easier alternative is to download the Padma Extension for FireFox from this page:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/873/

It is supposed to provide support for display of non-Unicode Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Devanagari, Gujarati, Bengali, and Gurmukhi.

The Perils of PDF

Anyone who has tried to work with PDF files whose content includes complex scripts has probably noticed that copy/paste and searching rarely if ever work. For those interested in this problem, here are five useful blog posts with comments that discuss this, with examples from Tamil:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/07/06/10031112.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/07/16/10038461.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/09/06/10057561.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/09/16/10062966.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/09/29/10069077.aspx

Native American Language Keyboards

The LanguageGeek website has available a large number of OS X keyboard layouts for Native American languages. Check this page for further into and download links:

http://www.languagegeek.com/keyboard_general/mainkeyboards.html

New Plug-in for Complex Scripts for Adobe Apps

WinSoft has announced ScribeDOOR, which expands the capabilities of standard versions of Adobe InDesign or Illustrator CS4 or CS5 to edit and treat text in various complex scripts. According to their specs, support includes Arabic, Azeri, Bengali, Farsi, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer/Cambodian, Lao, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Thai, Urdu, and Vietnamese.