Font With New Turkish Lira Symbol

Thanks to Michael Everson, there is now a font available for those who need to display/print the new Turkish Lira symbol.  See

http://evertype.com/fonts/rupakara/

Bug In Apple Malayalam Fonts

A poster in the Apple discussions has pointed out the neither of the two fonts provided by Apple for the Malayalam script in OS X and iOS display the correct glyphs for the yy and vv consonant clusters, which are supposed to represent the second member by a small triangle under the first character.

To get correct display in OS X you will have to use the font sold by XenoTypeTech or the Rachana font from

http://sites.google.com/site/macmalayalam/

(Unfortunately adding fonts to iOS devices is not yet possible).

PS There appears to be another bug with incorrect display when two viramas are typed in succession (or the lack of a ZWNJ on the keyboard to create the equivalent effect).

12/3/12  These bugs have not been fixed as of 10.8.2

Fixing Custom "English" Region Settings

English speakers living in countries where the native language is something else often wish to have their System Preferences/Language & Text/Formats/Region set to a mixed value, such as "Italian (English)."   While this is normally possible when you first set up your OS, such a setting will disappear if you switch it to something else, so you cannot get it back directly.

In such a case, try opening Terminal.app and inputting the command

defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences AppleLocale en_IT

Of course you will need to change the IT for Italian to whatever country you are aiming for.

Fixes For Keyboard Layout Issues When Running Windows on a Mac

If you run Windows on your Mac via Bootcamp or a virtual machine, you may have noticed that Mac and PC keyboard layouts can be quite different for some languages. Unfortunately keyboard layouts that allow Windows to use Mac keyboards are rare.

Here are two that I know of so far:

Arabic (Mac)
British English (Mac)

If anyone knows of others, please chime in.

The tool for making Windows keyboards that act like Mac versions is the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.