MacOS: New Cuneiform Input Method

Thanks to Marco Sartori, a new input method is availble for typing Cuneiform script, which is used to write various languages of the ancient Middle East. It can be downloaded from this page.

Put the .inputplugin file in Library/Input Methods or Home/Library/Input Methods, logout/login, and then activate it via the plus button in System Settings > Keyboard > Input Sources. Look for it in the Simplified Chinese area. A Readme file should be included which explains how to use it. If you find problems or want to suggest improvements, you can contact Marco at sartma@gmail.com

Here is some earlier info on Cuneiform from this blog.

MacOS 13 Ventura: New Language Features available Oct. 24

Apple plans to release MacOS Ventura on Monday, Oct. 24, and has published a new list of features. As far as I can tell, the new language features are the same as reported here earlier.

Apple Hardware Keyboards for Non-Latin Scripts

See this page for info on Apple's keyboards for Arabic, Bulgarian*, Greek*, Hebrew*, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Chinese (Zhuyin), Thai*, and Ukrainian. The keyboards marked with an asterisk are not available in the US online store and may be difficult to find outside the country where they are used.,

iOS 16: New Language Features

Apple has published a preview of the new features in iOS 16 to be released in the fall. For the language area these additions include:

System Languages: Bulgarian and Kazakh

Keyboard languages: Apache, Dzongkha, Samoan, Yiddish

Dictionaries: Bangla–English, Czech–English, Finnish–English, Hungarian–English, Kannada–English, Malayalam–English, and Turkish–English

Translation: Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese, Polish, Indonesian, and Dutch

Live Text: Japanese, Korean, and Ukrainian

VoiceOver and Text to Speech: More than 20 additional languages and locales, including Bengali (India), Bulgarian, Catalan, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese

Chinese: Cantonese input using Jyupting and other phonetic methods, Quickpath for Traditional Chinese Pinyin, Changyong layout for Shuangpin users, Sichuanese dialect support.

MacOS 13 Ventura: New Language Features

Apple has published a preview of the new features in MacOS 13 Ventura to be released in the fall. For the language area these additions include:

System Languages: Bulgarian and Kazakh

Keyboard languages: Apache, Dzongkha, Samoan, Yiddish

Dictionaries: Bangla–English, Czech–English, Finnish–English, Hungarian–English, Kannada–English, Malayalam–English, and Turkish–English

Translation: Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese, Polish, Indonesian, and Dutch

Live Text: Japanese, Korean, and Ukrainian

VoiceOver and Text to Speech: More than 20 additional languages and locales, including Bengali (India), Bulgarian, Catalan, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese

Chinese: Cantonese input using Jyupting and other phonetic methods, Sichuanese dialect support, Changyong input for Shuangpin users.

MacOS 12.4: New Icons for Keyboard Layouts

The latest update of MacOS 12 Monterey replaces the remaining multicolor country flag icons for different language keyboard layout with black/white symbols containing idenfying characters for the language. Users who want to keep the traditional flags can make a customized layout with any icon they want with Ukelele.

Apple Ukrainian Keyboards

Apple has recently started selling stand-alone Ukrainian keyboards, which I don't remember ever being offered before. For more info see this page.

MacOS: New Hungarian Qwerty Keyboard

The Hungarian Qwerty input source that comes with MacOS does not have any semicolon. Here is a version which has that character and others in the same position as the normal Hungarian (Qwertz) input source.

MacOS: Russian Keyboard Layouts Without Russian Flag

Apple has long provided English keyboard layouts with an ABC icon for English speakers who prefer not to have the US or other country flag in the top right corner of their screen all the time. Here you can find a set of Russian language keyboards that have a generic Cyrillic "Я" icon instead of a national flag.

(Install the .bundle file in /Library/Keyboard Layouts or Home/Library/Keyboard Layouts and then activate via System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources > + )

For a Russian layout with a Ukrainian flag icon, see this page.

MacOS: Russian PC Keyboard Layout Error

A poster the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that the Russian PC keyboard layout supplied with MacOS and iOS has an error: The key which is supposed to produce Ё (U+0401, Cyrillic Capital Letter IO) actually produces Ë (U+00CB, Latin Capital Letter E with Diaresis). A custom layout that corrects this for MacOS can be found here. It's not possible yet to make custom hardware layouts for iOS, so the problem cannot be fixed there.