Monday, June 10, 2013

New Language Features in OS X 10.9 Mavericks and iOS 7

There seem to be only a couple new language features in OS X 10.9 and iOS 7 as announced June 10, 2013.  Thanks to blog readers I have so far

1) new French and German voices for SIRI, with more languages promised for later

2) Chinese-English, Italian, Dutch, and Korean reference dictionaries

3) Settings for Tencent Weibo microblogging for Chinese users and multi-character handwriting recognition

4) a possible Tamil keyboard in iOS 7 (OS X has had one for quite a while already).

If you spot any others, let me know.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Indic Script Bug in Final Cut Pro X

A poster in the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that it's not possible to create Tamil language titles in Final Cut Pro X via copy/paste -- nothing happens.  Direct typing also does not work right.

My tests indicate that the same copy/paste bug affects Burmese, Bengali, Kannada, Khmer, Oriya, and Sinhala.  On the other hand, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Lao, Malayalam, Telugu, Thai, and Tibetan seem to be possible (but certain Thai characters will not work).

For the problem scripts, workarounds might be to use a separate titling app like Belle Nuit or  create the titles in iMovie and import the track into FCPX.