Mavericks Update Fixes Japanese Input Problem

The glitch with the Japanese Kotoeri IM reported here has been fixed in the OS 10.9.1 update released 12/17/2013.  Kotoeri Preferences (found when one of the Japanese IM's is selected in system preferences/keyboard/input sources) now has a setting for the keyboard layout, as was present in 10.8 and earlier.

Apple has also issued a note regarding a problem some users have encountered with a grayed-out Hiragana input.

In case you are wondering where the "Register Words" option for Kotoeri has gone, this function has now been taken over by system preferences/keyboard/text/text substitutions, as explained here.

Typing Paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician

I recently came across a source for fonts for Paleo-Hebrew and other ancient semitic scripts on this page.

Input for most can be via the OS X Hebrew keyboard layout or my experimental Phoenician range layout available here.

Language Map of the US

I recently came across this map showing details of where languages other than English are common in the US.   Results I found somewhat surprising are the Russian in Alaska,  Chinese in eastern Washington and western NY,  Hindi in Iowa, Hmong in Minnesota,  Arabic in Michigan, and widely scattered areas of German.

Non-Unicode Tamil Fonts

While it is strongly recommended that only Unicode fonts be used for writing Tamil, sometimes you have to work on documents which were created using legacy encodings like TSCII, TAB, and TAM, which will not display properly unless you can find the right non-unicode font.  I recently came across a source for these which may be helpful in such cases at

http://azhagi.com/freefonts.html

Bug In Apple Devanagari Font

A poster in the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that the font Devanagari Sangam used for iOS (and also available in OS X 10.7 and higher) produces the wrong glyph for the "eyelash RA" character.

The font Devanagari MT, which is the default for OS X, does not have this problem, so using that is a fix.  For iOS there is no way to avoid the bug until Apple fixes Devanagari Sangam.

Keyman App For iOS Now Installs Fonts As Well

The Keyman app which vastly expands the screen keyboard possibilities for iOS devices, reported here, now also installs a font if one is missing (using the technique reported here.).

This should greatly benefit those users whose language has lacked font support up to now -- such as Myanmar, Khmer, Lao, and Amharic/Ethiopic.