Fixing Chinese Display in iOS

In the Apple Support Communities someone reported they were seeing the Japanese version of Han characters when they should be seeing the Chinese version. This can happen because the default Han font used by iOS for plain text is determined by the order of languages on the list in Settings > General > International > Language.

To make sure the default font is for Chinese, one fix is to switch the OS to Chinese and then back to English, which should put Chinese in second place on the list. Info on how to switch languages when you don't know one of them can be found here.

Even with rich text where correct fonts are specified in the markup code, Mac apps may not recognize them if they are not present in OS X, and the same fix would be required in that case.

An example of the difference:

Japanese Version 所 and Chinese Version 所.

Alternative Cherokee Keyboard Layout

The Cherokee Qwerty keyboard layout provided with OS X is not ideal, because the key sequences required for some characters do not match those normally used by this language -- e.g. Ꮭ is typed R-A instead of t-l-a.

Using a script created by SIL, I have put together an experimental alternative layout which avoids these issues. Readers are welcome to test it and report any problems.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/46870715/CherokeeDK.keylayout.zip

Google Translate for iOS Adds Indic Languages

The Google Translate app for iOS described in an earlier article has been expanded to cover a number of additional languages, including experimental support for Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu.

Text translation is now available for 63 languages, voice input for 17, and text-to-speech conversion for 24. I find the audio input/output features kind of amazing.