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

Reading/Writing Burmese/Myanmar in OS X

Burmese/Myanmar is spoken by an estimated 42 million people in S.E Asia. Support for this script is not yet included in OS X, but XenotypeTech offers a commercial kit for the Mac.

Sources of free fonts and keyboards are:

http://edwardwitten.blogspot.com/2007/10/zawgyi-myanmar-keyboard-for-mac-os-x.html

http://www.myanmaritpro.com/

There seem to be two standards in common use. Some info about their differences can be found here.

Burmese/Myanmar on iPad and Other iOS Devices

Those wishing to read and write Burmese/Myanmar on iOS devices should try the apps iMyanmar and MMKeyboard.

I would be interested in any reports about how well they work. These apps incorporate a Burmese font to make up for the lack of one in iOS.

Custom Keyboards for iOS Devices

While there is still no way to create custom keyboards for iOS the way you can for OS X, I have seen two apps which let you produce keyboards that can be used to generate text for emailing or copy/pasting into other apps. These are UniKey and Unicode Map. UniKey comes with keyboards already made for Georgian, Armenian, Chess, and Afrikaans.

Reading Non-Unicode Indic Language Web Sites

Earlier I mentioned the Padma extension to Firefox which lets you read web pages in various Indic languages that require custom fonts. I have recently found a Gateway site which converts a number of such sites to Unicode so you can read them on any browser, as long as you have a Mac Unicode font installed for the script:

http://uni.medhas.org/

Scripts covered are Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu.

This site might be especially useful for the iPad and other iOS devices where you cannot install Firefox or add custom fonts.

iOS Has No Capital Sharp S (ẞ)

A poster in the Apple Support Communities recently pointed out that iOS devices cannot display the character Latin Capital Letter Sharp S (U+1E9E), which was added to Unicode in 2008 and can potentially be found in German language text. Oddly even the full OS X only has one font that includes this character, Geneva Regular. For some background, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_ß

Unicode Demo

For a page that displays all 109,384 characters in Unicode 6.0 in succession, go here:

http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2011/04/unicode-60-one-character-at-time.html

Slavic Language Transliteration Tools

Danslav Slavenskoj has recently published as series of useful extensions for the Safari and Chrome browsers that will transliterate among a number of Slavic languages. You can find them at

http://slavenica.com/browser/

(Note that these change the way text is displayed on the browser, and you may mistakenly think that something is wrong with your system if you forget that you have them activated.)

Google Translate App for iOS Offers Audio Input/Output

The Google Translate app released in February for iOS devices has the capability to transcribe speech in one language, translate it into another, and then speak out the translated text. I tried this with some simple phrases and found it kind of amazing.

The languages covered for speech input besides English are Japanese, Chinese, Afrikaans, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Speech output includes these plus Arabic, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Hungarian, Norwegian, and Swedish.

Online Customized Font Maker

I recently discovered the SIL TypeTuner site, which may be of interest to others. It enables you to download customized versions of the SIL special language fonts Andika Basic, Charis SIL, Gentium Plus, Doulos SIL, Lateef, and Scheherazade with a range of special features which you can select from a menu. To try it out, go to

http://scripts.sil.org/ttw/fonts2go.cgi

I assume that these fonts can also be embedded in webpages using @fontface, so that you can create webpages that will display the special features of your custom font even though the viewer has not installed it on his machine.

OS X 10.7 Lion: New Language Features?

Apple's recent preview of OS X 10.7 Lion does not mention any new language features, but some of the rumor sites like Macrumors and Appleinsider have published reports of a) Arabic system localization, b) voices for text-to-speech for languages other than English, and c) access to accented characters via a popup menu when a key is held down.

Update: A 4/8 report by Appleinsider indicates TextEdit will now have the vertical text layout capability considered important for Chinese and Japanese.

Lion is scheduled for release in the "Summer of 2011."

More Indic Fonts for OS X

As mentioned in an earlier article, iOS currently includes fonts for a half-dozen Indic languages which are not yet part of OS X (Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Sinhala). Thanks to Nick Shanks there is now a way to use them in OS X as well. See this page for info.

Font and Keyboard Layout for Amharic

For those interested in the Ethiopic script, used to write Amharic, SIL has recently released a new version of its Abyssinica font and OS X keyboard layout, which can be obtained here.

As of OS X 10.7, Apple provides a font for this script called Kefa (but no keyboard layout).

Indic Scripts Keyboards Available for iOS

There is now an app, IndicNotes, which provides a way to input Devanagari, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, and Gurmukhi on the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch. You can copy/paste what you compose into other apps or share directly via email, facebook, or twitter.

PS (6/16/11) Another option are the PaniniKeypad apps, which are available for Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Punjabi, Malayalam, and Tamil.

Real Time Translation App for iOS Devices With Camera

http://questvisual.com/

Only Spanish/English at the moment.

iBookstore Language Support

In the iBookstore Publisher User Guide it says:

"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 find it surprising that Chinese and Japanese would be on this list, the others not so much. By implication all sorts of Indic scripts (Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali, Tibetan, etc) are supported, which is interesting as well.

For updated info see here.

iPad Country Releases

Q: In which countries has the iPad been officially released for sale, and when?

A:

April 3: US

May 28: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK

July 23: Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore.

September 17: China, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru

November 30: Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Malaysia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Sweden, and Taiwan

Mobile Safari Displays Embedded Fonts

I just noticed that the Safari on my iPad with iOS 4.2.1 will display embedded .ttf/.otf fonts -- fonts that are not part of iOS but downloadable from a web page. For an example try my Egyptian Test Page.

This is a very important capability, since users are not able to add any fonts to iOS devices.

My iPod Touch, still on iOS 4.0, lacks this feature, so it must be new. Also the new WOFF format, designed to offer greater IP protection, does not work yet.

iPad Language Capabilities Expanded

iOS 4.2 for the iPad was released today and as expected it brings the language capabilities of the iPad up to those available for a while now in the iPhone/iPod Touch, including Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Korean, Traditional Chinese, etc. A full list can be seen in the updated iPad Tech Specs:

http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/

No keyboards are yet available for Indic scripts, even though fonts are present for Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Sinhala. (The full OS X still does not have the last 6 of these.)

For a full list of virtual and hardware keyboard layouts, see

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/ipad4kbs.html

I understand that the Keyboard Dock is available in the following layouts: English, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and French.

MS Office 2011 Language Support

The Help for Office 2011 for Mac provides the following list of supported input keyboards and methods:

"Australian, Austrian, Belgian, Brazilian, British, Bulgarian, Canadian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dvorak, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Inuktitut, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian (F.Y.R.O.), Northern Sami, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss French, Swiss German, Turkish, U.S., Ukrainian, Unicode Hex Input, and Welsh. You can also use the following Mac OS X input methods: Hangul, Kotoeri, Murasu Anjal Tamil, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese."

A list of languages for which proofing tools are available is here.

I am skeptical that Murasu Anjal Tamil will actually work and am seeking confirmation. MS claimed that for Office 2008 as well, and it turned out to be incorrect.

PS For a great analysis by Michael Kaplan of Mac Office 2011 support for Tamil, see this article.

Unicode 6 Released

http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/

Will MS Word for Mac 2011 Do Arabic and Hebrew?

With the announcement of the Oct. 26 release date and appearance of a MacWorld review, we are wondering whether Word will in fact finally support RTL scripts. This blog entry last month seemed to indicate "no", but the MacWorld reviewer has posted a "yes" for Arabic in the comments section of his own piece.

Some earlier postings based on beta versions seemed to say "yes" or "only for reading".

http://www.apple-wd.com/2010/04/arabic-support-and-msoffice/

http://macbiblioblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/still-no-hebrew-for-word-2011.htm

Update Oct. 15: In response to a question, the MS Office for Mac Team blog owners responded that "Due to technology limitations on the text input tools, Office for Mac’s Unicode support won’t include right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic."

Fixing Broken British English Spell Checking

I've seen a couple of reports in the Apple Discussions about Pages and other apps in 10.6.4 refusing to recognize the OS X British English spell checking dictionary for certain users regardless of the care taken to ensure various settings are right for that.

One fix that has worked in some cases is to download the OED dictionary from this site, install the .dic and .aff files in Home/Library/Spelling, and set the dictionary in Edit > Spelling > Show Spelling (or Inspector > Text > More > Language in Pages) to English (Library).

New Reference on Working with Classical Languages

David Perry has recently completed the 2nd Edition of his excellent "Document Preparation for Classical Languages," which covers such topics as Unicode, smart font technology, and how to choose typefaces and editing tools, with special reference to Classical, Biblical, and Medieval Studies and Linguistics. For more info go to

http://scholarsfonts.net/docproc.html

iPad Keyboards in iOS 4.2

Some sites have published info about iOS 4.2 beta which has been made available to developers for testing before release in November. According to this, the iPad will have the following virtual keyboards at that time:

English, English (UK), Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cherokee, S. Chinese (handwriting, pinyin, stroke), T. Chinese (handwriting, pinyin, cangjie, stroke, zhuyin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, French (Canada), French (Switzerland), German (Germany), German (Switzerland), Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese (romaji, 50On ), Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

If this list is correct, some keyboards available in OS X will still be missing: Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil.

In addition, some fonts that come with current iOS 4 (but not with OS X) will not have keyboards: Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Sinhala, Kannada, Malayalam, Lao.

More Keyboards for iPad Coming in November

Apple has announced the availability of iOS 4.2 for the iPad in November, including "Keyboard and dictionary enhancements: Choose from more than 30 new keyboards and dictionaries, including Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew."

Under Accessibility, they show "Output in braille to over 30 supported wireless Bluetooth refreshable braille displays in more than 25 languages."

(I count 13 keyboards in the current iPad and 49 in the last iPod Touch, for a difference of 36.)

New iPod Touch Adds Languages

According to the tech specs of the new iPod Touch announced today, some additional languages have been added in its version of iOS 4:

UI: Cherokee

Localized Keyboards: Tagalog, Cherokee

Localized Dictionaries: Tagalog

(Annoyingly no language info is included in the tech specs for the new Apple TV.)

Progress on Language-Related Work in CSS3

Readers interested in new possibilities that will be offered by the proposed CSS3 standards for webpages and other documents (e.g. ePub) that use Cascading Style Sheets may find it useful to check out the current drafts of the Text Layout Module and the Fonts Module.

In the proposed Text Layout Module are rules for specifying direction and block flow which should better enable display of vertical text such as sometimes used for the Chinese, Japanese, Uighur and Mongolian scripts.

The Fonts Module includes the possibility of enabling automatic downloading of fonts from a server, plus ways for authors to specify advanced typographic and language-specific features that may be available in OpenType or AAT fonts.

Of course it may be some time before these standards are agreed and adopted, and even longer before all are supported by Safari and other major browsers. I have seen a report that Firefox 4 beta supports the proposed advanced font features, but have not been able to test it.

Magic Trackpad Does Chinese Handwriting Input

Although Apple totally fails to mention it, the new Magic Trackpad will do Chinese Handwriting input just like the multitouch trackpad of certain Apple laptops. The July 29 report here may be of use to people who want to try it.

Update 8/13/2010: Apple has now documented this feature here.

As with the laptop feature, Japanese is not supported.

Alternatives for Missing iPad Keyboards

As of 11/1/2010, the iPad app store lists keyboards for Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese, Greek, Korean, Dvorak, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish, Czech, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Icelandic, Finnish, Serbian (Cyr), Serbian (Latin), Catalan, Macedonian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, and Pashto.

Viewing Non-Unicode Indic Language Web Sites

A good number of Indic language web sites have not yet converted to Unicode, but still require custom fonts and are designed to work only with special dynamic font support available in the Windows IE browser. Viewing them on a Mac can be tedious, since you have to find and install the font used by the site and then hope a Mac browser will recognize it. An easier alternative is to download the Padma Extension for FireFox from this page:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/873/

It is supposed to provide support for display of non-Unicode Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Devanagari, Gujarati, Bengali, and Gurmukhi.

The Perils of PDF

Anyone who has tried to work with PDF files whose content includes complex scripts has probably noticed that copy/paste and searching rarely if ever work. For those interested in this problem, here are five useful blog posts with comments that discuss this, with examples from Tamil:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/07/06/10031112.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/07/16/10038461.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/09/06/10057561.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/09/16/10062966.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/09/29/10069077.aspx

Native American Language Keyboards

The LanguageGeek website has available a large number of OS X keyboard layouts for Native American languages. Check this page for further into and download links:

http://www.languagegeek.com/keyboard_general/mainkeyboards.html

New Plug-in for Complex Scripts for Adobe Apps

WinSoft has announced ScribeDOOR, which expands the capabilities of standard versions of Adobe InDesign or Illustrator CS4 or CS5 to edit and treat text in various complex scripts. According to their specs, support includes Arabic, Azeri, Bengali, Farsi, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer/Cambodian, Lao, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Thai, Urdu, and Vietnamese.

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.