New Character Map App

Many users have been annoyed by Apple's deletion of the View = Glyph feature in the revised Character Viewer app of OS X 10.7 and later, which made it impossible to directly view and input the entire glyph catalog of individual fonts.   Ultra Character Map restores that capability:

http://www.x04studios.com/ultracharactermap.html

Unfortunately, for glyphs without Unicode code points, input is limited to a graphic of the glyph, rather than a normal "character".

OS X 10.8.1: Chinese Input Issue Addressed

Apple has released an update to Mountain Lion, 10.8.1, which includes a fix to "Address an issue that could cause the system to become unresponsive when using Pinyin input".

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5418

OS X 10.8: Chinese Text Converter Problem

Many users are finding that after upgrading to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, the service for converting between Traditional and Simplified Chinese no longer works.  For a fix see this post in the Apple Support Community.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: New Language Features

OS X 10.8 was released 7/25/2012.  It has no new OS/App localizations, keyboards for additional languages, or spellcheck dictionaries, but the 3 new reference dictionaries (German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese) are most welcome.  Plus there are a lot of new features for Chinese users, the details of which can be found at

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html#china

Note that the new Chinese fonts are "off" by default.  When you "enable" them, the OS will ask you to download them.  Also you may need to switch system preferences/language & text/region to China temporarily to see the new Chinese services in system preferences/mail, contacts & calendars and in app menus.

Dictation is available in English (US, UK, Australia), French, German, and Japanese.  Any comments on how well it works in these languages would be welcome.

(I'm a little surprised there are no keyboards for Ethiopic/Amharic or Lao, since the requisite fonts were added already in 10.7)

iOS 6 Language Features Announced at WWDC 6/11

Siri languages expanded to include English, Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, German, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean.

New Chinese Features: "With precision text input, a comprehensive up-to-date Chinese dictionary, and handwriting recognition support for over 30,000 Chinese characters, iOS 6 gives Chinese speakers more features than ever. You can mix full and abbreviated Pinyin and even type English words in a Pinyin sentence without switching keyboards. And when you add words to your personal dictionary, iCloud makes them available on all your devices. Baidu is a built-in option in Safari, and you can share videos directly to Youku and Tudou. You can also post to Sina Weibo from Camera, Photos, Maps, Safari, and Game Center.."

(iOS 6 to be released 9/19/2012)

OS X 10.8 Language Features Announced at WWDC 6/11

New Dictionary.app modules for German, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese

Dictation in English (U.S., UK, and Australia), French, German, and Japanese

Lots of things for Chinese, including improved input methods and 8 new fonts.  For details see

Chinese Features

(OS X 10.8 to be released in July)

Diacritic Variations in Polytonic Greek

A poster in the Apple forums recently asked how he could get a particular form of the circumflex/perispomoni accent to appear in his ancient Greek text.  There are namely two common variations, one looks like a tilde and one like an inverted breve, and he needed the latter.

It turns out that the form of this diacritic for Greek depends on the font.  Of those which cover this range that come with OS X 10.7, Arial Unicode, Geneva, Helvetica, and Times have the inverted breve form, while the rest (Arial, Courier New, Helvetica Neue, Lucida Grande, Menlo, Microsoft Sans, Palatino, Tahoma, Times New Roman) use the tilde.

For some more info, see Section 1.2 of

http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/gkdiacritics.html

Font With New Turkish Lira Symbol

Thanks to Michael Everson, there is now a font available for those who need to display/print the new Turkish Lira symbol.  See

http://evertype.com/fonts/rupakara/

Bug In Apple Malayalam Fonts

A poster in the Apple discussions has pointed out the neither of the two fonts provided by Apple for the Malayalam script in OS X and iOS display the correct glyphs for the yy and vv consonant clusters, which are supposed to represent the second member by a small triangle under the first character.

To get correct display in OS X you will have to use the font sold by XenoTypeTech or the Rachana font from

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

(Unfortunately adding fonts to iOS devices is not yet possible).

PS There appears to be another bug with incorrect display when two viramas are typed in succession (or the lack of a ZWNJ on the keyboard to create the equivalent effect).

12/3/12  These bugs have not been fixed as of 10.8.2

Fixing Custom "English" Region Settings

English speakers living in countries where the native language is something else often wish to have their System Preferences/Language & Text/Formats/Region set to a mixed value, such as "Italian (English)."   While this is normally possible when you first set up your OS, such a setting will disappear if you switch it to something else, so you cannot get it back directly.

In such a case, try opening Terminal.app and inputting the command

defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences AppleLocale en_IT

Of course you will need to change the IT for Italian to whatever country you are aiming for.

Fixes For Keyboard Layout Issues When Running Windows on a Mac

If you run Windows on your Mac via Bootcamp or a virtual machine, you may have noticed that Mac and PC keyboard layouts can be quite different for some languages. Unfortunately keyboard layouts that allow Windows to use Mac keyboards are rare.

Here are two that I know of so far:

Arabic (Mac)
British English (Mac)

If anyone knows of others, please chime in.

The tool for making Windows keyboards that act like Mac versions is the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.

A New Way To Make Custom Keyboard Layouts

An earlier article described how you can customize the new Character Picker introduced with OS X 10.7 Lion, so that the popup menu that appears when you hold down a key can contain whatever characters you want.

This feature strikes me as more revolutionary that it might first appear. A custom popup menu can also contain combining diacritics (Unicode block 0300 - 036F). That means you can set up a single key which, when held down, will let you add any arbitrary diacritic(s) to any base letter you have just typed. This has the potential to be a lot easier than the usual US Extended and other layouts with their complex systems of option and option + shift shortcuts. Perhaps the use of those modifier keys to create special characters can be done away with altogether.

Resources for Cuneiform Language Work

These two pages give up-to-date font and keyboard layout resources for OS X for those working with Cuneiform script and/or its Latin transliteration:

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/user/fonts

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/user/keyboards

For inputting Cuneiform from the keyboard:

http://www.hethport.uni-wuerzburg.de/cuneifont/download/NesiliKeys 2.0.zip

OS X 10.7 Lion: Customizing Character Picker

Over at apple.stackexchange.com a poster has figured out how to customize the popup menu of special characters that appears when you hold down a key in Lion. The list of characters in that menu is given, for example, in the Keyboard-en.plist found in System/Library/Input Methods/PressAndHold.app/Contents/Resources.

Access to Contents can be obtained by selecting the app icon and doing Control +click/Show Package Contents. Logout/login should be done after editing the .plist.

Windows Font and Script Support

Of possible interest for those using Windows on their Mac, I recently came across this page which provides info on the font and script support of various Windows versions, including the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/bb688099

iOS 5.1 Adds Language Features

iOS 5.1 released March 7 adds some new language features, but only for certain devices: the iPad 3 gets dictation in US/UK/Australian English, French, German, and Japanese. The iPhone 4S gets Siri functions in Japanese in addition to the languages provided earlier (English, French, German).

I don't have devices with these features, but I understand that for Siri the language is selected in Settings / General / Siri / Language.  Also the keyboard should be set to the language being spoken.  Internet access is required.

Mountain Lion: Special Chinese Features

Today Apple posted info regarding the features of the next version of OS X, Mountain Lion, which includes the following:

"All-new features for China

It’s a new Mac experience in China. OS X Mountain Lion brings all-new support for many popular Chinese services. And they’re easy to set up. Mail, Contacts, and Calendar work with QQ, 163, and 126. Baidu, the leading Chinese search provider, is a built-in option in Safari. The video-sharing websites Youku and Tudou are included in the new Share Sheets, so users in China can easily post videos to the web. They can also blog with Sina weibo, the popular microblogging service. And with improved text input, typing in Chinese is easier, faster, and more accurate."

Engadget adds some more detail in its description: "including better word and phrase suggestions, autocorrect, enhanced handwriting recognition and the ability to type in English without changing keyboard settings. "

iBookstore Language Support

The latest version of the iBookstore Publisher User Guide, dated 1/19/12, has the same language exclusions as the one from 2010:

"What languages does the iBookstore NOT support?

At this time, the iBookstore does not support the following languages: Persian, Old (ca.600- 400 B.C.), Persian, Samaritan Aramaic, Amharic, Arabic, Official Aramaic (700-300 BCE), Imperial Aramaic (700-300 BCE), Burmese, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Judeo-Persian, Judeo- Arabic,Central Khmer, Lao, and Mon-Khmer languages."

I wonder if this is really accurate. If readers find books in the store in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Hebrew, I would welcome hearing about it.

PS I have personally found a lot of Chinese books in the store, so clearly that language is in fact supported.

For updated info, see here.

OS X 10.7.3 Adds 8 New Localizations

Catalan, Croatian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Ukrainian

Wow, that raises the total from 22 to 30.

New iBook Author App Has Same RTL Bugs as iWork

My initial tests indicate that the new iBook Author app announced by Apple 1/19/12 has the same bugs with Arabic/Hebrew input as the iWork apps and iWeb have always had. There is no setting for "writing direction" (such as found in TextEdit) and the cursor doesn't work properly, so that editing via insertion/deletion is pretty much impossible.

Korean Apple Support Community Available

A new Korean version of the Apple discussion forums (known formally as ASC -- Apple Support Communities) has become available at

https://discussionskorea.apple.com/index.jspa

As far as I know, until now the only other non-English forum run by Apple was that for Japanese:

https://discussionsjapan.apple.com/index.jspa

Loeb Classical Library Greek/Latin Texts Online

Anyone interested in finding downloadable copies of Loeb bilingual Greek/Latin classical texts, many of which are out of copyright, should check out this site.

Reading Non-Unicode Kurdish

I recently got a query from a user indicating that Kurdish in Windows docs was appearing on their Mac with various Arabic language letters where Kurdish characters should be.

I could not figure out how that would happen, until I stumbled across a wikipedia article telling how special "Ali" fonts had been devised to let Windows users who only had an Arabic keyboard layout could still create text that looked Kurdish. Luckily the same article provided the address of an online site which can translate the non-standard "Ali" encoding into real Kurdish Unicode.

The same site can be used to convert a number of other non-Unicode Kurdish font systems.

Internationalized Domain Names Revisited

Since my earlier article on this topic, updated specifications for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNA2008) have been published. As a result, users can probably expect to see a rapid increase in urls written in scripts other than Latin.

Because of security concerns about phishing and other possible misuse of IDN's, browser makers have adopted (differing) mechanisms to filter the way users see such urls in the address bar after they click on a link.

Safari will display urls in their Unicode form for any script on a well-hidden, user-editable "whitelist." Others are displayed in a Latin "punycode" version.

Chrome displays urls in their Unicode form as long as they contain characters from a single language among those on a list set by the user in the browser preferences and do not contain any "blacklisted" characters. Otherwise in punycode.

Firefox and Opera display urls in their Unicode form only if they are on a "whitelist" of approved domains maintained by Mozilla and do not contain any "blacklisted" characters. Otherwise in punycode.

I had a look at the Safari script whitelist and it seems to me that it could be a good deal longer without causing any additional problems. As a "script" can sometimes cover many languages, Apple's method seems rather less restrictive than those used by the other browsers. Whether that is better for the user I don't know.

Typing N'ko

The N'Ko (ߒߞߏ) script, used for writing a number of West African languages, was the topic of a NY Times article recently.

For those wishing to read/write N'ko on OS X, try the font and keyboard available here or the kit from XenoTypeTech.

For using N'Ko on iOS devices, get the Tw Tool N'ko app.

Classic Mongolian Script Input for iOS

Classic Mongolian Script is notoriously difficult to input and display on a computer -- OS X 10.7 still cannot handle it -- but there is now an app for this for iOS devices: Mongolian Type Writer. Emails, for example, include both a graphic in vertical format and a text file in horizontal format.

Fixing Chinese Display in iOS

In the Apple Support Communities someone reported they were seeing the Japanese version of Han characters when they should be seeing the Chinese version. This can happen because the default Han font used by iOS for plain text is determined by the order of languages on the list in Settings > General > International > Language.

To make sure the default font is for Chinese, one fix is to switch the OS to Chinese and then back to English, which should put Chinese in second place on the list. Info on how to switch languages when you don't know one of them can be found here.

Even with rich text where correct fonts are specified in the markup code, Mac apps may not recognize them if they are not present in OS X, and the same fix would be required in that case.

An example of the difference:

Japanese Version 所 and Chinese Version 所.

Alternative Cherokee Keyboard Layout

The Cherokee Qwerty keyboard layout provided with OS X is not ideal, because the key sequences required for some characters do not match those normally used by this language -- e.g. Ꮭ is typed R-A instead of t-l-a.

Using a script created by SIL, I have put together an experimental alternative layout which avoids these issues. Readers are welcome to test it and report any problems.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/46870715/CherokeeDK.keylayout.zip

Google Translate for iOS Adds Indic Languages

The Google Translate app for iOS described in an earlier article has been expanded to cover a number of additional languages, including experimental support for Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu.

Text translation is now available for 63 languages, voice input for 17, and text-to-speech conversion for 24. I find the audio input/output features kind of amazing.

OS X 10.7 Lion Can Now Use Windows Indic Fonts

A reader of this blog has pointed out to me that, apparently without any notice, Apple has expanded OS X support for OpenType font features, so that at least some apps can now use Windows fonts as well as the AAT fonts supplied by Apple for complex Indic scripts like Devanagari. A good test is to use the font Sanskrit 2003 in TextEdit.

This is a major improvement, because it opens up a much larger range of fonts than have been possible up to now for scripts used by a major segment of the world population. Unfortunately my tests (so far only with Devanagari) indicate that this capability is not yet available in iWork apps or Openoffice or Mellel. But it does work in Nisus Writer.

I understand that this new feature should be available in any apps that use Core Text.

Full List of iOS5 Keyboard Layouts

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/ios5kbs.html

Scripts for which iOS5 does have font support (so it can display web pages, email and other text) but still no keyboard for input are Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Telugu, Sinhala, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Armenian, Georgian, Lao, and Yi

Certain apps can be used to create custom keyboards that may be useful.

Pages for iOS 5 Has Special Formats for Chinese/Japanese/Korean

The latest version of iOS Pages, 1.5, which requires iOS 5, provides some CJK-specific text-formatting features, including emphasis styles, list styles, and phonetic guides. For details see this page:

http://help.apple.com/pages/ipad/1.5/#tanfbd4156e

It appears that vertical text is still not supported.

New Language Features in iOS 5

New OS Languages: None

New Keyboards: Hindi, Hawaiian

New Dictionaries: Hindi, Hawaiian, Estonian, Latvian, Cherokee

(Keyboards still without dictionaries: Bulgarian, Icelandic, Macedonian, Serbian, Tibetan)

(Fonts still without keyboards: Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Telugu, Sinhala, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Armenian, Georgian, Lao, and Yi)

Note that SIRI is only available on the iPhone 4S and is not part of iOS 5 for other devices at this point.

New Language Features in iPhone 4S

At the 10/4 event announcing the iPhone 4S, Apple said the "Siri" personal assistant of this device will include dictation capabilities and its other speech recognition features in English (US, UK, Australia), French, and German. More languages were promised for later (including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish in 2012). I understand that an internet connection is required.

The 4S also for the first time includes a Hindi and Hawaiian keyboard. There are new dictionaries for Hindi, Hawaiian, Estonian, Latvian, and Cherokee.

Typing Dhivehi/Maldivian

Dhivehi/Maldivian is spoken by about 350,000 people in the Republic of Maldives. It uses the right-to-left Thaana script, for which OS X does not yet have either a font or a keyboard layout.

For a keyboard layout, try this:

http://www.mohamedmalik.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/thaana_osx.zip

For fonts, try these:

http://mvheadlines.com/downloads/fonts.zip

I'm not sure which app will display Dhivehi most correctly -- try TextEdit, Open/Neo/LibreOffice, and Mellel. Feedback from readers about whether any of these do a good job with this script would be welcome.

OS X 10.7 Lion: Possible Fix for Missing Chinese YiTian IM

There have been several complaints in the Apple discussions about the omission in Lion of the YiTian keyboard layout in the Traditional Chinese Zhuyin IM. A recent post recommends Yahoo KeyKey as an alternative:

http://tw.media.yahoo.com/keykey/

I don't know enough about this to evaluate it, and would welcome any comments by readers.

Odd Chinese Display Issue

If you are seeing something strange where the Simplified Chinese character 门 (men2, U+95E8) should appear, there is nothing wrong with your system or app. It turns out that the Hiragino Japanese fonts supplied with OS X have an unusual version of this (the left character in the graphic below), which I've been told can be found in Japanese handwriting (see example 2 at this page ). Normally Japanese computer text will have the Traditional character 門 (U+9580) instead.

To fix this display issue, so you get the character on the right side of the graphic, make sure that in System Preferences/Language & Text/Language you have Japanese lower on the list than Chinese, or use the Edit button to uncheck the box for Japanese.

One might consider this to be a bug in the font.  Following the Unicode Standard, this version of the character should be invoked by the data sequence U+95E8 U+E0100 (or E0101), where the second element is an ideographic Variation Selector.

Italian Module for OS X Dictionary.app

http://www.spider-mac.com/2010/09/04/l-plug-in-dizionario-italiano-per-leopard-e-snow-leopard/

OS X 10.7 Lion: Fixing Mixed Localization Problems

I've seen several reports in the Apple Discussions from users who have system alerts or other menus/dialogues in two languages at once, such as English and Arabic, or English and Danish.

A possible fix for this is to go to system preferences/language & text/language and use the Edit button to uncheck the box for the language you don't want and then restart.

OS X 10.7 Lion: Getting Rid of "Character Picker"

A new Lion feature taken over from iOS is the "Character Picker", which generates a popup menu of accented characters when you hold down the base letter on the keyboard. Some users detest this, as it stops the key repeat function which normally results when you hold down a key. To get rid of Character Picker, open Terminal and type

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

and then restart.

OS X 10.7 Lion Chinese Improvements

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/osx7.html

A bug: Bopomofo input is messed up when the candidate window is vertical. Switch to horizontal to get it to work right.

(Fixed in 10.7.2)

OS X 10.7 Lion Adds Major New Language Capabilities

New OS and App localizations: Arabic, Czech, Hungarian, and Turkish. These bring the total to 22.

New languages supported with both fonts and keyboards: Bangla, Georgian, Kannada, Khmer, Kurdish, Malayalam, Myanmar, Oriya, Sinhala, Telugu, Urdu. These have about 600 million speakers all together.

New languages/scripts supported with fonts only: Ethiopic/Amharic, Lao, Emoji

New languages supported via voices: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish. These must be downloaded separately.

New Spellcheckers: None

Other new features: Support for vertical text in TextEdit, access to accented characters via a pop-up dialogue when you hold down a character, improved Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese input methods, British English modules in Dictionary.app, support for Windows Indic fonts in TextEdit.

Pinyin Keyboard for iOS

Pinyin is the official standard for using the Latin script to represent Mandarin Chinese. There is now an app which makes it really easy to type Pinyin on iOS devices and then email the result or copy/paste it to other apps:

http://troubadourworks.com/pinyintypist/

Typing Nuosu Yi

Nuosu Yi is spoken by a couple million people in SW China and is written using several hundred characters representing individual syllables. Further info can be found on the Babelstone Yi Page, and links to several useful resources are available here.

Both OS X and iOS come with fonts for reading/writing Unicode Yi.

The logical way to type Nuosu Yi is with an input method like those used for pinyin Chinese. You can obtain such an IM via this link.

iOS 4 Display Languages

While the "supported" languages for iOS are listed in the tech specs for the iPad and related devices, iOS 4 also includes fonts that permit display of a number of additional languages and scripts in apps such as Safari, Mail, and Pages. These include Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Telugu, Sinhala, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Armenian, Georgian, Lao, and Yi.

No New Localizations for Pro Video Apps

I had thought that Apple might add more language localizations when totally redesigning Final Cut Pro, but from the Mac App Store entry which appeared today these remain at the traditional 4: English, French, German, and Japanese. OS X Lion and its non-pro apps will have 22 when released this summer.

Norwegian Spell Check and Dictionary.app Module for OS X

http://home.no/stavekontroll/mac.html

http://www.mediafire.com/?2u4nyqny2ilrs8d

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/697341/norske-ordlister-stavekontroll.pkg

Romanian & Slovak Localizations

Anyone interested in Romanian language localizations of OS X and some apps should check out this site. For Slovak, see here.

OS X 10.7 Lion: More on New Language Features

Apple has released more info on new features in OS X 10.7 Lion. Of interest related to languages are:

+Voices in 23 languages (compared to 1 in Snow Leopard).

+Safari support for vertical text and Web Open Font Format (WOFF)

+New System Localizations in Arabic, Czech, Turkish, and Hungarian

+iOS-like access to accented characters via a pop-up dialogue when you click on a character

+General support for vertical text in apps other than Safari

+Fonts added for Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Telugu, Ethiopic, Lao, Khmer, and Myanmar, plus color Emoji

+Improved Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese input methods

Extra Spell Checking Dictionaries for OS X 10.6

Apple provides only a limited selection of spell checkers for OS X. But you can also add dictionaries used by OpenOffice. You just put the .dic and .aff files in Home/Library/Spelling.  Sources for these:

1) http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries

2) http://extensions.services.openoffice.org:80/en/dictionaries

3) https://github.com/SublimeText/Dictionaries

4) https://dictionaries.io

What you download from the second source will have the extension .oxt. You need to change this to .zip, then double click on the file. The resulting folder should contain the .dic and .aff files.

Oddly those sites have nothing for Turkish.  For that try this one:

http://code.google.com/p/tr-spell/downloads/list

For Greek, go here.

For Finnish, go  here.

For Catalan, go here.

For Slovak, go here.

For info on making dictionaries, see >this page