iOS4 Displays Indic Scripts, More Keyboards

A major surprise after installing iOS4 on my iPod: Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, and Tamil display correctly! Not only that, this OS has Indic fonts that OS X is still missing: Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Sinhala, Kannada, and Malayalam. Plus Lao. There is a bug in Sinhala.

Major scripts still not available are Ethiopic, Khmer and Burmese. There is a Tibetan font, but it does not render correctly.

A test page for some scripts is here.

iOS4 provides for using hardware keyboards. As a result, a lot of keyboard layouts have been added to accommodate that, plus various other changes. Here is a complete list.

The Japanese and Chinese IM's have a Custom Dictionary facility so users can create their own pinyin/yomi to hanzi readings. Chinese IM's have a switch to turn on a "fuzzy pinyin" option (but I'm not sure how that works).

The Emoji keyboard choice only works on devices used in Japan (unless you employ special tricks to activate it). But the Japanese and Chinese keyboards have a key which generates a menu of conventional ascii "facemarks".

Switching among keyboards can now be done via a menu that appears when you hold down the "globe" icon.

Voice Control has 24 languages. VoiceOver has 21 and can be set independently of the OS language.

Also see this earlier article.

Romanian Module for Dictionary.app

Thanks to Sorin Paliga you can download a Romanian Dictionary that functions as a part of the OS X Dictionary.app from this location:

http://command-n.ro/forum/files/download/8-dex-offline/

Word Web App Does Arabic and Hindi

MS Word for Mac currently cannot do complex scripts such as Arabic or Hindi, and it looks like the next edition, to be released with Office Mac 2011, won't have that capability either. But my initial tests of the Word Web App now available as part of Windows Live Office indicate that these scripts are possible when using this "cloud" version.

A reader with a PC has confirmed that they display correctly when the Word Web app .docx is viewed or downloaded with a Windows machine. Whether such a doc created using a Windows machine will display correctly on a Mac remains to be tested.

There seem to some input problems with Safari when the Alt/Option key is required -- characters may not appear in the text. Firefox works OK, however. Opera does not work at all.

iOS 4: New Language Features

Judging from the tech specs for iPhone 4, the new iOS 4 (formerly iPhone OS 4), available for iPhones and iPod Touch starting June 21, has the following added language features compared to the current version:

Localizations: Hungarian, Catalan, and Vietnamese

Keyboards: Cangjie and Wubihua for Chinese, plus Catalan and Vietnamese

Dictionaries: Hungarian, Flemish, Catalan, Vietnamese

Voice Control: Danish

iOS 4 is expected to be available for the iPad in the fall of 2010.

Typing Urdu

I did a short article about Urdu a while ago, but it has come to my attention that Kamal Abdali has created a really excellent and comprehensive resource for Urdu on the Mac, which you can find at

http://geomete.com/urdumac.html

Viewing Hindi, Tamil, Bengali Websites with Your iPad/iPhone/iPod

Apple's mobile devices are in general still unable to correctly display Unicode Indic scripts like Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Tibetan. But it turns that the Opera Mini browser can solve that problem for web pages by turning the text into a graphic. To activate this feature, you have to type opera:config in the browser address window. A page of settings will then come up, and you go to the very bottom one called "Use Bitmap Fonts for Complex Scripts", set that to Yes, and hit the Save button.

More Tibetan Fonts and Keyboards

My thanks to Andrew Main for alerting me to a new source for OS X Tibetan fonts and keyboards. If you go to the downloads page on the Tibetan Geeks site and then click on the file "Monlam_bodyig-v.3-macosx.zip", you will get a set of 13 Monlam fonts and 2 keyboard layouts.

Also Jomolhari, which seems to work in 10.6 but not in 10.5.

These are a welcome addition to the two Tibetan fonts supplied by Apple and the commercial fonts available from XenoType.

Give us your impressions if you try the Monlam fonts.

iPad Language Capabilities Update

The iPad became available today. As noted in an earlier article, the language capabilities (listed in the tech specs) are rather less than those on the iPhone/iPod Touch. In particular there is no input for Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and also various European languages (see list here.)

iPad Safari and Pages can display all of the missing scripts without problem, however. As in the iPhone/iPod, support for Indic scripts, such as Devanagari, Tamil, and Tibetan is still not available. There is no ability to add additional fonts. A list of included fonts can be found here.

International Keyboards are discussed on pages 19-20 of the iPad User Guide. This states that "some languages written from right to left" are supported, which is clearly wrong at this point.

Japanese Input includes qwerty, azerty, and qwertz Keyboard Layouts, but no direct Kana input. Chinese, in addition to handwriting, provides qwerty and azerty.

There is a dual set of keyboard layouts in Settings, one for the virtual keyboard and one for hardware keyboards. For example, under English Hardware, you can choose US Extended, US International PC, and Dvorak, among others. A full list of layouts is here.

To use a JIS (Japanese) hardware keyboard, set the iPad OS to Japanese before trying to pair it.

As of 7/28/2010, the iPad app store lists keyboards for Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese, Greek, Korean, Dvorak, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish, Czech, Ukrainian, and Macedonian.

Apps that let you input all unicode characters include Unicode Maps, Unicode, and Unicode Table.

Apple says iBooks can display books written in English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish. The built-in dictionary is only available in the English language. I have reports that iBooks can also display other languages, but that the page order is wrong in RTL scripts.

VoiceOver speaks 13 languages and works with all of the applications built into iPad. The list of languages is that found on this page.

Pages 1.0 is only available in English. A 5/13 update adds French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish. Pages cannot display advanced typography in the Hoefler Text font.

Typing Orkhon/Old Turkic

Orkhon, or Old Turkic, is a script used by the Göktürks of Inner Asia and first found on inscriptions dating to the 8th century. It is one of the new additions to Unicode 5.2. Emir Yasin Sari has created both a font and a keyboard for Orkhon, which you can download here.

Embedded Font Support Test

CSS 3 will eventually include standards for code that tells browsers to temporarily download normal .ttf and .otf fonts needed to display text when they are not present on the machine, and the latest Safari, Chrome, and Firefox browsers already support this feature. Some additional info can be found here.

I've seen a report that Mobile Safari (e.g. iPad, iPhone) does not support embedded fonts, unless they are converted to SVG format.

I have put up a test page that should make your browser download the Gardiner font (assuming you don't have it already) to display some of the Egyptian heiroglyphs which start at U+13000 in Unicode 5.2. It may take a bit of time for the characters to show up.

This technique has interesting potential for enabling the display of uncommon language scripts without requiring the viewer to deliberately download and install special fonts.

Fonts That Expand Word 2008 Language Capabilities

MS Word is normally unable to handle Arabic, Hebrew, plus Indic and other complex scripts. But XenoTypeTech has found that with certain fonts Word 2008 for Mac can be used for Tibetan, Khmer, Tai Le, Kannada, and Malayalam. See this page for info.

New Keyboard for Tagalog

Thanks to Alex Ibrado there is a new keyboard layout for Tagalog (also known as Baybayin or Alibata), a pre-Spanish writing system used in the Philippines. You can get it here.

OS X does not come with Tagalog fonts, but these should work.

OS X Support for Ideographic Variation Sequences

In an earlier article I noted that Unicode 5.1 added codepoints for Ideographic Variation Sequences (IVS), which can be used to trigger display of glyph variants in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

OS X 10.6 has support for IVS in TextEdit, as described in this recent blog article. All you need is one of the Adobe Pr6N Japanese fonts.

Inputting an IVS is not so simple, however, because Character Viewer won't scroll down to U+E0100 and the Unicode Hex keyboard requires typing in two surrogates. The easiest way is to have UnicodeChecker on your machine. Then you can copy/paste from that or type in the character entity (like 󠄀 ) and convert it via the html > unicode item in the Services menu.

PS I see now an easier way. You can put the IVS characters in the Kotoeri dictionary and invoke them via vs0, vs1, etc. directly from the Kotoeri IM. Here is a demo page I did using that method.

No Language Fixes in Office for Mac 2011?

MS has now released info on the new features expected in Office for Mac 2011 here. It's hard to believe, but there is no indication that the much-requested support for Arabic, Hebrew, and Indic scripts has been included.

Typing Naʻvi

Na'vi is the constructed language of the inhabitants of the moon Pandora in the fiction movie Avatar. Though its native speakers have no writing system (as far as we know), Na'vi is represented in Latin script for earthlings' learning purposes.

The alphabet is the same as English, except for the accented vowels ì and ä, plus a glottal stop represented by ’ . All of the required characters can be made easily using the normal US keyboard layout -- ì is Option/alt + ` then i, and ä is Option/alt + u, then a.

While the author of the language has employed underlines to indicate syllable stress, this is impossible in plain text, so an acute accent might be used as an alternative (made via Option/alt + e, then the vowel).

Ideally for digital representation of Na'vi something other than the straight or curly Apostrophe (U+0027 or U+2019) should be used for the glottal stop, because this character is actually "punctuation" rather than a "letter" and is often ignored in text processing operations like sorting, matching, and searching. Also it cannot be used in an internet domain name.

To avoid such problems one can use the Modifier Letter Turned Comma (U+02BB) or the Modifier Letter Apostrophe (U+02BC). The former is found for the glottal stop in Hawaiian (called ʻOkina) and the latter in Navajo. Unfortunately these are not available on the US keyboard, so one would have to make a custom layout for Naʻvi.

You can download an experimental Na'vi keyboard here. It puts ì, ä, and U+02BC on the [, ], and \ keys, and the acute accent vowels on the Option/alt keys.

For a good site with materials and forums on Na'vi, see Learnnavi.org.

For the language creator's site, see http://naviteri.org/

iPad Language Capabilities

Apple released the tech specs for its new iPad on January 27, and they indicate its language capabilities are somewhat less that those of the iPhone and iPod Touch:

Language support for English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Russian

Keyboard support for English (US), English (UK), French (France, Canada), German, Japanese (QWERTY), Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, Italian, Simplified Chinese (Handwriting and Pinyin), Russian

Dictionary support for English (US), English (UK), French, French (Canadian), French (Swiss), German, Japanese, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, Italian, Simplified Chinese (Handwriting, Pinyin), Russian

Whether the web browser and other apps might correctly display additional languages is unknown at this time. A test page for various scripts can be found here.

2/12 This page indicates iPad has browser support for Arabic display.

3/12 The Apple iPad Accessibility page say "VoiceOver speaks 21 languages and works with all of the applications built into iPad." This conforms with what is provided with some models of the iPhone and iPod Touch (and much superior to OS X, which is English only unless you buy 3rd-party voices). The list of languages is probably that found on this page.

The first iPads are supposed to be available April 3.

Google Nexus One Language Support

Considering Google has probably the best online translation site, and the Google Search interface is localized in well over 100 languages, I was thinking the Nexus might have particularly good language support. However it turns out to be much more limited than the iPhone. The tech specs say

Display: English (U.S), French (France), German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Korean, Japanese, Russian

Keyboard: English (U.S), French (France), German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil)

New Khmer Font for OS X

Thanks to Danh Hong a new font for reading/writing Khmer script in OS X is available hereor here. You can find related info in my earlier article.

I encourage readers to give the new font a try and let us know if you find any issues. I'm told it will also work right in Word 2008 for Mac if you set the 'enable all ligatures' option under Format/Font/Advanced.

Using Linux for Language Input

Sun's free VirtualBox software has made it extremely easy to run Linux concurrently with OS X, and there are various HowTo's on the web (e.g. this one) for doing it. Some reasons this could be useful are a) to use the variety of Windows fonts available for Indic and SE Asian scripts where the Mac only has a couple or none, and b) to use input methods for these scripts which are not yet available for OS X.

I installed Ubuntu this way and everything worked well. It comes with the IBus framework that includes a large number of IM's -- For example there are 6 for Devanagari (Inscript, Phonetic, Remington, iTrans, Typewriter, Harvard-Kyoto). You can also install the SCIM platform if you want. Copy/paste from the included OpenOffice suite to OS X apps was no problem.

A couple drawbacks: I could not find anything like Keyboard Viewer (or Help files) to assist in figuring out how various IM's or layouts work, so you need to get that off the internet or someplace else. Also Ubuntu only lets you have 4 ordinary keyboard layouts active at once (the number of IM's seems unlimited).

I tried out Linux once before 10 years ago...

Fixing Keyboard Type Problems

Macs normally have one of three different physical keyboard types, which Apple calls JIS (for Japan), ISO (used in Europe, for example) and ANSI (used in the US). ISO has one key more than ANSI -- it is located between z and shift -- and JIS has quite a few differences.

Sometimes a machine will forget which type keyboard is attached, with the result that certain keys get transposed from what the user expects. The fix for this is run the Keyboard Setup Assistant again. Sometimes there is a button for "Change Keyboard Type" visible in System Preferences/Keyboard. If not, you can try trashing the file

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist

(Note that this is in the Library folder, not System/Library and not Users/username/Library)

Another possibility may be to open Terminal and type:

sudo open /System/Library/CoreServices/KeyboardSetupAssistant.app/Contents/MacOS/KeyboardSetupAssistant

Sometimes, when JIS is involved on a laptop, one may have to follow the procedures in the SMC Resetting instructions.

If none of those work, this Karabiner option may be helpful.

Also see the last few answers at this page.

For reference, this doc shows the different keyboards supplied by Apple around the world.

Doing Multilingual Text in TeX

TeX is a typesetting software popular in the scientific world for producing high-quality documents. The newest versions support Unicode and opentype fonts and can generate multilingual pdf output. The learning curve is steep, however, because TeX is the opposite of WYSIWYG and the user needs to know a lot of commands.

If you want to give it a try, download and install the large or small packages from here. Open TeXShop, set the mode to XeLaTeX, and choose the XeLaTeX template. Toward the bottom you will see how you can name fonts and test text in various scripts. Hitting the Typeset button will generate a .pdf. I tried adding Hindi, Tibetan, and Egyptian Hieroglyphs and it seemed to work fine.

Multilingual Braille Converter

OS X comes with 5 Unicode Braille character fonts. In looking for some way to use them other than input via the Character Palette, which is very cumbersome, I came across this online Braille Converter. Besides English, it also appears to handle more than a dozen other languages.

Writing Ancient Egyptian 2009

In an earlier article I wrote about typing Egyptian Hieroglyphs using non-Unicode systems. Now Unicode version 5.2 includes the Gardiner set of 1071 Hieroglyphs, and you can input them from the Character Palette using the font Aegyptus.

For info relating the Unicode set to the Manual de Codage (MdC) system, see this note.

I wonder if one could make some kind of useful keyboard IM for these using the OS X Custom IM Generator…

(12/1/2009) A reader has posted an experimental MdC IM .cin file here. Others are encouraged to give it a try.

OS X 10.6: Switching the Arabic-PC Keyboard

It was an excellent idea for Apple to include an Arabic - PC keyboard layout in Snow Leopard. But one has to wonder where they got the mapping they used. A poster in the Apple forums pointed out that the character Thal ذ (U+0630) is at an obscure non-standard location (Option/alt + 3) and the character Shadda ّ (U+0651) is not present at all, at least on an ANSI keyboard.
Normally, as shown here, these characters are on the leftmost key of the top row. On an ISO (102-key) layout, they should be next to Return.

For an alternative layout that I think comes closer to what PC users expect, try this one.

Oddly enough, the Arabic - PC layout that was included in Leopard is OK.

Three Keyboards for Canadian French

Recently someone asked for a Canadian French keyboard layout, and to my surprise I found that there are at least 3 of them in use, all quite different. Apple provides Canadian French - CSA with OS X, and another one, Canadien Français, with a Quebec flag icon, can be found here. Finally, there is the Canadian French which Apple provided with OS 9. You can get this one from my iDisk.

This graphic shows the differences in the layouts.

How to Convert Old .rsrc Keyboard Layouts

Originally Mac keyboard layouts came in the form of .rsrc files. Unfortunately these sometimes no longer work in the latest versions of OS X, or don't work for all apps. Thanks to info on the Ukelele site, I've located a way to convert these to the newer .keylayout format.

Download and install the Apple Font Tool package from here. Then put your old .rsrc keyboard file in your Home directory, open Terminal, and type

klkchrtoxml name.rsrc

If all goes well, you should find a new file, name.rsrc.keylayout, in your Home directory. There will also be an .icns file if your old layout had an icon in it. If that command doesn't work, you can also try

kluchrtoxml name.rsrc

iPhone/iPod Touch: Useful Language Apps

A key feature of the iPhone/iPod Touch is the ability to draw Chinese and Japanese characters on its screen. I don't know how useful this is for creating text, but it is an invaluable replacement for radical/stroke analysis when looking up these characters in a dictionary. For Japanese I am using the app Kotoba and for Chinese DianHua.

Other language apps I've found so far that seem especially useful or high quality are the mobile version of Google Translate, the Larousse Dictionnaire de Français, the Classic Greek dictionary Lexiphanes, and the Latin dictionary Lexidium.

Additional suggestions by readers are most welcome.

Expanded Unicode Input on iPhone/iPod Touch

I've been looking for a way to generate any Unicode character on an iPhone or iPod Touch but have not found an app yet which does this. I tried a variety of charts and virtual keyboards reachable via Safari, and the best one seems to be

Macchiato's Character Picker

You can adjust the page size and save it to one of the app screens, and then select the character range that appears on the virtual keys and input them into the text box at the top. Unfortunately the device keyboard pops up after every entry, but you can dismiss that. In order to copy/paste the result you have created, you must let the Apple keyboard remain after inputting your last character.

(12/15) The iPhone/iPod Touch app Unicode Table now has a copy/paste function for individual characters which is easier than using the website mentioned above.

Reading the Blog on the iPhone/iPod Touch

Google has a service that reformats your blog feed so it is optimal for mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPod Touch. To see this blog on your device, point its browser

HERE

and make a bookmark or save it to your home screen.

Twitter!

I get on Twitter sometimes and see what people are saying about Unicode or other topics of interest. You can participate via the web or use one the large number of dedicated apps.

Twitter supports Unicode, but some apps are better than others. With Tweetdeck, you need to set the font preferences to International. Neither Tweetdeck nor Seesmic will display complex scripts like Hindi correctly, but Tweetie and Echofon do. Those are the only ones I've tried so far.

Jim DeLaHunt has done a survey of language use on Twitter, check out this page. The top 5 are English, Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, and German.

British English Localizations Coming?

UK users have long complained about the lack of British English localization (or "localisation") of OS X and Apple apps, but I see that the new iTunes 9 does have one. To activate it you must put British English at the top of the list in System Preferences/Language & Text/Languages.

OS X 10.6: Changing Default Font for Trad. Chinese

Apparently a number of Traditional Chinese users find the new font used by Snow Leopard by default for that language (HeiTi TC) to be inferior to that used in Leopard (LiHei Pro). A utility called TCFail has been created to change it back. See this page for info:

http://zonble.github.com/tcfail/en.html

New Malayalam Font for OS X

Thanks to Vinod Prabhakaran for alerting us to the availability of a new, free OS X font and keyboard for Malayalam. You can get it here:

http://sites.google.com/site/macmalayalam/

Readers who know this script are encouraged to give it a try and provide feedback to its creators.

OS X 10.6: Some Font Improvements

Looking further into Snow Leopard's fonts, I've found a couple of interesting refinements:

The character repertoire of Geneva has been expanded considerably. Ranges added are Greek, Ogham, Cyrillic Extensions A and B, plus two blocks from Unicode Plane 1, Ancient Symbols and Old Italic.

The new monospaced font Menlo has a broader than expected script coverage, including Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, and Georgian in addition to the normal Latin. Lao is also present, but about 20 characters seem to be missing.

OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard): New Language Features

Here are the new language features I've seen so far in Snow Leopard 10.6.0:

1) Chinese handwriting input is possible for laptops with Multi-Touch trackpads when using Apple Chinese IM's.

2) The Chinese Pinyin input method is improved and some new Heiti and Hiragino CJK fonts are provided.

3) Polish is included the list of built-in spellcheckers, and you can now add .dic/.aff format dictionaries from other sources (e.g. OpenOffice ). Also you can set the system wide spell checking language without changing the system language itself.

4) The ability to set the keyboard layout as the same for all docs or different for each doc, present in Tiger but omitted in Leopard, has been restored.

5) Bidirectional text (e.g. English/Hebrew) now has system-wide settings for split-cursor, and for RTL, LTR, and Default text directions. (But it looks like RTL problems in iWork/iWeb have not been addressed).

6) VoiceOver is now able to handle all 18 system languages (but only English is provided by Apple).

7) Unicode is upgraded to the latest version (5.1 of 4/4/2008)

8) A "US International - PC" keyboard layout is included, which will be welcomed by Switchers accustomed to using this for W. European languages. (Another has been available on the Web for some time, however.)

9) Hitting Space while holding down Apple/Command will produce a list of active keyboard layouts in the center of the screen, which can be selected via the mouse or the up/down arrows.

10.6 has no new localizations for OS X or any new languages for reading and input.

Also it appears that File > Get Info no longer has a Languages tab, which makes it hard to run an app in a language other than that of the OS. A workaround may be here.

A Hebrew Display Issue

Recently in the Apple Discussions a user had some problems making Hebrew Final Kaf plus Sheva display correctly. Getting this right requires that the font have enough smarts to combine the two characters involved (U+05DA and U+05B0) properly, putting the Sheva inside the Final Kaf instead of just underneath its vertical stroke, as is done elsewhere. Apple's Hebrew Qwerty keyboard layout also requires that you type Shift + k to get Final Kaf rather than just Kaf. This graphic shows how different Hebrew fonts I have on my Leopard system render it in TextEdit. Unfortunately 4 of the 5 supplied by Apple don't do a good job.

Why No Mac Browser Support for Vertical Text?

The ability to display webpage text in vertical format is highly desirable for Chinese, Japanese, and possibly other languages. Recently I checked Safari 4.0.3, FireFox 3.5.2, and Opera 9.64 and found that they still cannot do this in OS X, using this test page.

Same failure for Google Chrome.

I understand that Win IE (starting with version 5.5) is the only browser which has this feature.

Can it really be so difficult?

Braille Output Available in New Languages

Thanks to Archie Robertson there are now free Braille output packages available in French, Norwegian, Danish, German, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew. For info see this page.

New Language Features in Windows 7

MS has announced that Windows 7 will be released in October. This blog article gives info on some of its improvements in the area of internationalization. Notable are a large number of new fonts and some 38 OS localizations.

This page lists the 150+ keyboard layouts apparently available.

OS X 10.6 is apparently staying with the 18 localizations available in 10.5.

New Nastaliq Font For Pro Arabic Script Apps

In an earlier article we provided information on the limited possibilities for displaying Nastaliq-style script in OS X. Recently DecoType, which produces software for top-end Arabic script typography, has released a new font for doing Nastaliq with WinSoft's Tasmeem plug-in for Adobe InDesign ME. Further info can be found here.

Typing Khmer

Khmer is the official language of Cambodia. Currently the only way to read or type this script correctly on a Mac is to acquire the Xenotypetech Language Kit.

Free Khmer fonts for Windows are available here, but various characters will not display properly in OS X. For a free keyboard layout to use with these, download and install NiDA_Khmer_Mac.1.0.keylayout from this site.

If you have a copy of OpenOffice 2.3/2.4 (the one that used X11, not version 3.0), I think windows Khmer fonts may display correctly in that app.

iPhone 3GS Has Multilingual Voice Control

According to the info on Apple's website, the new Voice Control feature available in the iPhone 3GS can handle 21 languages, including 3 varieties of Chinese, and 2 each of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Multilingual Voice Over, where the iPhone can speak song titles and artists's names, is also available in 24 languages, as listed here.

Typing Tajik

Tajik is a variety of Farsi/Persian spoken primarily in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, but also Iran and Afghanistan. In the former two countries, it uses the Cyrillic alphabet with 6 characters beyond those found in Russian. OS X includes the fonts necessary for this language.

You can get experimental Cyrillic Tajik keyboard layouts here. The QWERTY version has a graphic to show the character location. The PC version has the special Tajik characters on the Alt/Option layer of the normal Russian keys. Leave a comment if you find errors or think improvements are desirable.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Specs Released

Apple has announced that the next version of OS X, 10.6 Snow Leopard, will be available in September, and posted its tech specs. As far as I can tell from what has been released, 10.6 will have no new language localizations (I would have expected perhaps at least Arabic) and the only expansion in language input capability may be Chinese handwriting for machines with a multitouch trackpad.

Under Key Technologies the specs say "Unicode 4". Hopefully this is a typo, since Unicode 5 has been available since 2007.

The Accessiblity page indicates that VoiceOver will be able to do all 18 system languages, but the extra voices will have to be purchased separately.

PS (6/17): I see the specs have been updated to say Unicode 5.1.

New Stuff in Unicode 5.2

For those interested in the evolution of Unicode, reliable info on what will be included in Version 5.2 (probably being finalized and released around October) is now available. New scripts are Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Avestan, Tai Tham, Tai Viet, Bamum, Imperial Aramaic, Inscriptional Pahlavi, Inscriptional Parthian, Javanese, Kaithi, Lisu, Meetei Mayek, Old South Arabian, Old Turkic, and Samaritan.

For more details, see Andrew West's excellent article.

Of course we are still a long way from having fonts available that incorporate this Unicode update.

Another Chinese Encoding Puzzle

Someone on the Unicode list had a text where strange escape codes had replaced accented chracters. For example the word "clichés" was printed as clich\x{5ee5}. The escape code presumably represents Unicode U+5EE5 or 廥. How could that happen? It turns out that this character has the code E973 in Big5, and that E9 73 in Latin-1 is és. So somehow a Latin-1 text was read as Traditional Chinese in Big5, then read again as Unicode and the non-Latin bits converted to escape sequences.

To make such a text readible, one can convert the the \x{abcd} escapes to the ꯍ html format, view the text with a browser, copy/paste to a text doc, save as Big5, and open as Latin-1.

iPhone 3.0 Software Adds Languages

In today's presention regarding the next version of iPhone software, which is supposed to be released sometime this summer, Apple indicated that it will include new languages and keyboards.

Unfortunately I have not found any info yet about which ones (though I would expect at least Arabic/Hebrew, Greek, and Thai might be among them). If anyone has details, let me know.

PS As of 3/25 I have seen online photos or other reports indicating new keyboards are available for Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Malay, and Thai.

PSS Apple issued the tech specs for the iPhone with 3.0 software on 6/8/2009. It confirms UI, keyboard, and predictive dictionaries for Arabic, Thai, Greek, and Hebrew.

PSSS When made available 6/18/09, 3.0 has off/on switches for two keyboards not mentioned in the tech specs, Bulgarian and Macedonian. But these keyboards do not work.

New Scottish Gaelic Spellcheckers

Thanks to Sealgar IT, users of Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) can obtain new spellchecking dictionaries for this language for use with CocoAspell and with OpenOffice 3 from this page.

New iPod Speaks 14 Languages

The new iPod Shuffle has a "Voiceover" feature which can speak song titles and artists names in English, Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Czech, German, Japanese, Spanish, Dutch, Greek, Polish, and Swedish.

http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/voiceover.html

Hopefully this will find its way into future versions of OS X (where Voiceover is currently only English, unless you purchase additional 3rd party voices).

Montenegrin Keyboard

Montenegro became independent of Serbia in 2006. For those who might want to use Apple's Latin and Cyrillic Serbian keyboard layouts with the Montenegrin flag showing in the Finder, the files for this can be downloaded here. For information on the status of Montenegrin as a language, see this article.