iOS 8 Safari Translation Feature

Earlier this year I had not been able to get the integrated translation feature which is supposed to be present in iOS 8, at least for Safari, to work, but now it does, and some instructions for setting it up can be found at

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-translate-websites-in-safari-on-ios-8/

It covers 44 languages.

OS X 10.10 Yosemite: Reference Dictionaries Provided by Apple

WIth the 5 added in Yosemite, the full list (shown below) is impressive.

OS X 10.10 Yosemite: New Devanagari Fonts

In Yosemite Apple added 3 new Devanagari fonts (ITF, Kohinoor, Shree) and switched the default from the venerable Devanagari MT to Kohinoor.  Kohinoor and ITF have a larger number of weights than the earlier fonts,  and Shree includes an italic version.   Samples are provided below:

OS X: Fixes for Broken Character Picker

If you find that you no longer have the Character Picker (that's the popup menu with accented versions of the key you are holding down), I've seen two fixes that sometimes work:

+Use the plus and add buttons in system preferences/keyboard/input sources to add another keyboard like French or Spanish to your list of active keyboard layouts.

+Go to system preferences/keyboard and toggle the key repeat rate to Off and then on again.

Reboot afterwards.

iWork for iCloud Gets Expanded Language Capabilities

On Nov. 21 Apple updated its iWork web apps -- Pages, Numbers, and Keynote beta for iCloud -- to include 8 new languages: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Simpified Chinese, and Spanish.

Pages (but not the others) can finally do RTL text input, Arabic and Hebrew.

Indic scripts are still not supported.

OS X Yosemite: Update Fixes Japanese Input Issue

The official release notes for the OS X 10.10.1 update include:

+Addresses an issue that might prevent entering text in Japanese

I'm not sure sure exactly what that issue was, there have been various reports of Japanese problems in the ASC.  If someone finds out, let me know.

Multilingual Font Collection

I recently came across the Google Noto Fonts page, where you can download Unicode fonts for an incredible range of scripts all in one place.  They are under the free Apache license. 

Main Webpage Updated

The Unleash Your Multilingual Mac webpage has been updated for Yosemite here.

Comments/corrections welcome as always.

OS X 10.10 Yosemite: New Language Features

Upon initial testing I have found the following:

+New Localizations: Spanish (Mexico)

+New Spell Checkers:  Turkish

+New Dictionaries:  Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Thai, Spanish-English

+New Language Keyboards:  None

+3 New Devanagari Fonts

+Various Improvements in Japanese Input

+Context based candidates for Chinese Input

+Improved Chinese and Japanese Spotlight search

+40 Dictation Languages

iOS 8: Problem With Japanese Keyboard

A number of users have found that updating to iOS 8 makes the Japanese keyboard non-functional.  A possible fix for this is to reset the keyboard dictionary, via

Settings > General > Reset and tap Reset Keyboard Dictionary.

OS X: New Mongolian Keyboard Layout

Thanks to Mukhbayar Batkhuu there is a new Mongolian Cyrillic keyboard layout for OS X available at

Mongollian Keyboard for Mac


Another one can be found at

Mountainedge

And a QWERTY version can be had here.

3rd Party Keyboards for iOS 8

3rd Party keyboards are becoming available for iOS 8.  This article has one list.

If readers come across any which are useful for languages other than English, let me know.   So far:

+Sangam for Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit, Sinhala, Assamese, with suggestions, autocorrect, and next-word prediction.

+Georgian Keyboard and Adaptxt claims 90 languages.

+My Script Stack claims handwriting recognition for about 60 languages.

+FarsiKeys for Persian/Farsi.

+Black Keys for IPA, Persian, Aramaic Syriac, Assyrian, Coptic,Inuktatut, Burmese, Amharic, Pashto, Sorani Kurdish, Uyghur, Lao, Kazakh, Georgian, Armenian,Sinhala, Bangla, Malayalam, Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi

+Nepali Pro Keyboard

+Keyman Pro claims to cover 600 languages.

+Translit transliteration layouts for Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian, Belarus, Georgian, Greek, Macedonian.

+IPAChart for IPA characters.

+Davka Nikud for pointed Hebrew.

New Keyboards and System Languages in iOS 8

Apple has added keyboards for English (India),  Bengali, Filipino, Marathi, Slovenian,  and Urdu in the new version of iOS released 9/17/14.

The settings formerly available for us additional hardware-type keyboard layouts with iOS devices are no longer available.   For example, under English these were:  us, dvorak, colemak, us international-pc, us extended, british, french, german, spanish-iso, italian, dutch, belgian.

iOS 8 is supposed to have the ability to use custom keyboard layouts, and perhaps that will help make up for that omission.

New system localizations are Hindi and Tamil.

iPhone 6 Language Support

From Tech Specs published 9/17/14:

Language support

English (Australia, Canada, UK, U.S.), Chinese (Simplified, Traditional, Traditional Hong Kong), French (Canada, France), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish (Mexico, Spain), Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

QuickType keyboard support

English (Australia, Canada, India, UK, U.S.), Chinese - Simplified (Handwriting, Pinyin, Stroke), Chinese - Traditional (Cangjie, Handwriting, Pinyin, Stroke, Sucheng, Zhuyin), French (Canada, France, Switzerland), German (Germany, Switzerland), Italian, Japanese (Kana, Romaji), Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cherokee, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Emoji, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, Flemish, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian (Cyrillic, Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese

QuickType keyboard support with predictive input9

English (Australia, Canada, India, UK, U.S.) Chinese (Simplified, Traditional), French (Canada, France, Switzerland), German (Germany, Switzerland), Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Thai

Siri languages

English (Australia, Canada, UK, U.S.), Spanish (Mexico, Spain, U.S.), French (Canada, France, Switzerland), German (Germany, Switzerland), Italian (Italy, Switzerland), Japanese, Korean, Mandarin (Mainland China, Taiwan), Cantonese (Hong Kong)

Dictation languages

English (Australia, Canada, UK, U.S.), Spanish (Mexico, Spain, U.S.), French (Canada, France, Switzerland), German (Germany, Switzerland), Italian (Italy, Switzerland), Japanese, Korean, Mandarin (Mainland China, Taiwan), Cantonese (Hong Kong), Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malaysian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Swedish, Turkish, Thai, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

Definition dictionary support

English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Thai, Turkish

Bilingual dictionary support

Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish

Spell check

English (Australia, Canada, UK, U.S.), French, German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal), Russian, Swedish, Turkish

Fonts and Keyboards for Greek/Coptic Scholars

OS X users needing special notation and characters for work involving ancient Greek or Coptic texts may be interested in the set of fonts and keyboards provided by Ralph Hancock and Jean-Luc Fournet at

http://fournet.monsite-orange.fr/keyboards/

OS X: Assigning Default Language Keyboard to Apps

If you have a need to have particular apps always use the same input source, AutoKeyboard is designed to do that:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/51829/autokeyboard

New Language Features in iOS 8

At the WWDC June 2, Apple announced some new language features to appear in the next version of iOS:

+multilingual predictive typing via QuickType (14 countries).

+22 new languages for Siri

+real time in line translation via Bing

+ability to install system-wide third party keyboards

See the first Comment to this article for additional details.

New Input Methods for Indic Scripts

Thanks to Ranganath Atreya we now have some alternatives to Apple's keyboards for Indic scripts.  His user-configurable IM covers a variety of transliteration systems for Unicode Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu.  You can download it at

https://github.com/ratreya/Lipika_IME

OS 10.8 or higher is required.  A chart of the mappings can be found here.

If any users try this out, I would welcome seeing their comments here.

iWork for iCloud Beta: Still No Support For RTL OR Indic Scripts

The improvements added by Apple to iWork for iCloud beta on May 21 did not include any fixes to the broken rendering of Arabic or Indic scripts reported earlier.

Social Network App for Language Exchange

I recently became aware of an unusual app designed to facilitate social networking across language barriers and help people learning another language.  The range of languages supported seems quite large.  For further info go to

http://www.hellotalk.com/

I have not had a chance to try it myself.

Language Improvements In iOS and Mac Pages And Keynote

The new versions of iOS and Mac Pages and Keynote released by Apple April 1 have several new features for Arabic/Hebrew.

In Pages:

+New Arabic and Hebrew templates
+Improved support for bi-directional text
+Word count for Hebrew

In Keynote:

+Improved bi-directional support:  switch direction for text, lists and tables

I have not had a chance to test many of these yet, but I see that multicolumn text flow is now correct in Pages for RTL scripts.  To see the new templates you need to switch the OS language to Arabic/Hebrew.

iWork for iCloud Beta: Still No Support For RTL Or Indic Scripts

The improvements added by Apple to iWork for iCloud beta on April 1 did not included any fixes to the broken rendering of Arabic or Indic scripts reported earlier.

MS Word For iPad: No Support For Arabic Or Indic

My initial tests indicate that the Word for iPad app released today cannot do RTL (like Arabic -- wrong direction and letters not connected) or Indic scripts (like Devanagari -- no conjuncts or vowel reordering).

Like Mac Word, iPad Word can be made to add correct Arabic to an Arabic document created by Windows Word, which may be a useful in some circumstances.

Adding Reference Dictionaries to iOS

I had not thought it possible to add reference dictionaries to iOS, but recently came across this app which is supposed to be able to do it.  I have not tried it myself.

Dictionary Appender

To add .dict files to your device so that Dictionary appender can process them, use file sharing as described here.

Unfortunately this app was removed from the app store for some reason.  If anyone knows how to get it, let me know.

Typing With The International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is not a language but a set of agreed special symbols for describing the pronunciation of any language. Within Unicode they are spread over a number of different blocks, and your OS X should be able to display them with the right fonts. The Wikipedia IPA page is a good way to test your fonts, as the charts there are available both as text and as images.

To input IPA in OS X you need to use the app IPA Palette, the OS X Character Palette, or a special keyboard, such as that created by SIL. Any modern word processor should work.  

Languages Not Yet Supported in iBookstore

See here

Bug in Apple Arabic Fonts

A poster in the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that most Apple Arabic fonts in Mavericks will not display certain vowel sign sequences correctly, include the default Geeza Pro.

My initial testing indicates that Waseem and Diwan work, as well as some English fonts that happen to include Arabic, like Courier New.  Others are the SIL fonts Lateef and Scheherazade.

Writing Systems of the World

I recently came across this interesting map showing the geography of the world's major writing systems.

Mac 30-Year Anniversary Font

See this page to get a custom font created by Apple showing Mac models of the last 30 years.

The characters are in the Unicode Private Use Area.  You should be able to use the Character Viewer or the Unicode Hex keyboard layout to input them (U+E600 to U+E643).  Of course only someone else who has installed the font can see the characters on a web page or email, but they should show up on a .pdf for anyone.

Reading Non-Unicode Sinhala

While it is strongly recommended that only Unicode fonts be used for writing Sinhala, sometimes you have to work with text created using legacy encodings, which will not display properly unless you can find the right custom font.  I recently came across this site where such text can be converted to Unicode:

http://www.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk/ltrl/services/feconverter/

iWork For iCloud Beta: Still No RTL Or Indic Support

The update for iWork for iCloud Beta announced by Apple January 23, 2014 (the 3rd since its initial release to the public last July) did not fix the broken support for Arabic/Hebrew or Indic scripts.  The characters for Arabic are unconnected and in reverse order, while for Indic scripts vowel reordering and conjunct formation is not possible.   The languages involved are used by about 1 billion people.

App To Add Fonts to iOS Devices

Thanks to Keith Martin, there is now an app available which lets users add fonts to their iOS 7 devices, using the technique described in an earlier article.  You can get it at

http://thehelpful.com/iosfonts/

This should be particularly valuable for users who want to add fonts for scripts still missing from iOS, such as Myanmar, Khmer, Thaana, Syriac, Mongolian, etc.

iOS apps with similar capabilities are at

http://namedfork.net/fontmanager/

https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/anyfont/id821560738?mt=8