OS X Specialized Language Fonts

Various fonts provided with OS X have the necessary characters so they can be used for multiple languages.  For example, Arial can do English, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, and Arabic.  But Apple also provides a number of specialized fonts that are really only intended for one script.  Some have no Latin characters at all, and it is often best not to use those that do include Latin for pure Latin text. 

Such specialized fonts exist for Arabic, Armenian, Cherokee, Chinese, Cyrillic, Ethiopic, Hebrew, Indic Scripts, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Myanmar, Thai, Tibetan, and UCAS. You can see a rough list of them at this page.

Apple Opens Chinese Language Support Community

Apple has just opened a Chinese-language set of user-to-user discussion forums (the Apple  Support Communties), which you can get to at

https://discussionschinese.apple.com/

This joins the existing ASC's in English, Japanese, and Korean.

Alternative Text-to-Speech App for iOS

For those who want different voices than what Apple provides via the Speak Selection function in iOS,  I have recently come across an app Voice Dream which offers a possibly useful alternative for texts outside of Safari, Mail, iBooks, etc.

It covers 20 languages, including Catalan, which iOS does not yet have.  iOS languages currently missing from Voice Dream are Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Korean, Romanian, Slovak, and Thai.

A sort of free trial is available via the "Lite" version.