Wednesday, July 25, 2012

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: New Language Features

OS X 10.8 was released 7/25/2012.  It has no new OS/App localizations, keyboards for additional languages, or spellcheck dictionaries, but the 3 new reference dictionaries (German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese) are most welcome.  Plus there are a lot of new features for Chinese users, the details of which can be found at

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html#china

Note that the new Chinese fonts are "off" by default.  When you "enable" them, the OS will ask you to download them.  Also you may need to switch system preferences/language & text/region to China temporarily to see the new Chinese services in system preferences/mail, contacts & calendars and in app menus.

Dictation is available in English (US, UK, Australia), French, German, and Japanese.  Any comments on how well it works in these languages would be welcome.

(I'm a little surprised there are no keyboards for Ethiopic/Amharic or Lao, since the requisite fonts were added already in 10.7)

8 comments:

Magnus Lewan said...

Still no French dictionary? Pity.

Anonymous said...

A small change: the built-in Japanese dictionaries have changed from Shogakkan to Sanseido, which could be said to be more widely used, but the loss of the very useful usage dictionary can be fixed by adding back the files from a 10.7 backup. (However, now there is Spanish and German, which is very nice.)

Nikhil Gandhi said...

Sorry if I'm putting this comment in the wrong place. It appears that Mountain Lion now uses Devanagari Sangam MN as its default Devanagari font, not Devanagari MT as in previous OS X versions. This has distorted some of my documents (e.g. Keynote presentations) that were laid out according to Devanagari MT. Any idea how to fix this? I tried disabling Devanagari Sangam MN, which does seem to replace all Devanagari text with Devanagari MT, but in my documents it results in all conjunct consonants being split (e.g. प्र is now प् र). I don't see any solution except manually reformatting all of my documents. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Joe said...

As always, thanks, Tom.

Magnus - do you know where I can find the dictionaries in 10.7 so I'm sure I don't lose them before I update my machine?

Tom Gewecke said...

Joe -- dictionaries are in Library/Dictionaries

Tom Gewecke said...

Nikhil -- the behavior is puzzling, sorry I can't see any easy fix myself.

Steve said...

Hi Tom,

How do you "enable" these Chinese fonts in Mountain Lion? I'm a complete newb to Mac...

Also, it's a little off-topic, but do you have any idea if the Chinese dictionary (the three-finger click one usable on webpages) can be enabled while the primary language is English?

Cheers,
Steve

Tom Gewecke said...

Steve -- You turn on the dictionary in Dictionary.app > Preferences. You enable fonts via Fontbook > Edit > Enable