Friday, October 26, 2007

OS X 10.5 Leopard: New Fonts and Scripts

Tibetan: This is the primary new script included with Leopard, covered by the fonts KaiLasa and Kokonor, with 3 input methods provided.

Georgian: Included in the newly-added (but actually old) Windows Arial Unicode font. (This also contains Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayam, and Lao, but Leopard has been programmed to ignore them, perhaps because they would not display correctly.)

Shavian: Apple Symbols now has this in addition to Deseret.

No keyboard layout has been provided for Georgian, Shavian, or Deseret.

Reflecting the new Russian and Polish OS localizations, the number of fonts which include Cyrillic and the Latin characters needed for Polish has been significantly increased, and includes Marker Felt and Hoefler text among others.

Scripts included in Unicode 5.0 but for which users will still have to download fonts from other sources are N'ko, Phoenician, Balinese, Phags-Pa, Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform, Buginese, Glagolitic, Coptic, Tifinagh, Syloti Nagri, Old Persian, Kharoshthi, New Tai Lue, Limbu, Tai Le, Linear B, Cypriot, Ugaritic, Osmanya, Tagalog, Hanunoo, Buhid, Tagbanwa, Old Italic, Gothic, Syriac, Thaana, Sinhala, Myanmar, Ethiopic, Ogham, Runic, Khmer, Mongolian, Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayam, Lao.

Here is some info on script support in Windows, which does include a number of those still missing from OS X.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Can we type Kannada in Leopard?
Regards
Vikas

Tom Gewecke said...

As with Tiger, you can only type Kannada if you add a font and a keyboard. See this entry:

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2007/02/support-for-dravidian-languages.html

Anonymous said...

You may want to point out that a number of fonts were extensively revised to add Cyrillic, which is available now, for example, in fonts such as Helvetica, Times, Helvetica Neue, Marker Felt, and Hoefler Text. There were also additions to the Latin repertoires to cover Polish and characters added in Unicode 4.1 and 5.0.

Tom Gewecke said...

Thanks, John! I had not been aware of those improvements.

Anonymous said...

Gothic display fails in Leopard. The suggested fonts are not workable at all. http://got.wikipedia.org/

Burmese partly works.
http://my.wikipedia.org/

Tom Gewecke said...

Gothic works fine for me in Leopard Safari with the MPH font.

Burmese displays for Unicode 4, but not totally correctly, because OS X does not really support that script. I don't think there is a font available yet for Burmese in Unicode 5, so you see the unknown character signs.

Anonymous said...

I am running Mac OS 10.5 in English and I need to create some graphics in Georgian. I am receiving a word doc from the client in Georgian but the characters are being replaced by squares!? Can someone please help!? Many thanks, Aaron.

Tom Gewecke said...

Try setting the font in whatever app you are reading this doc with to Arial Unicode. If that doesn't work, then probably a non-standard font is being used and you will need to ask your client what it is an install it yourself. Or ask him to send you the text in Unicode.

Magnus Lewan said...

Do you have any more info about why Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayam and Lao are ignored in Arial Unicode? As many of them are supported with other fonts, I suppose it is something with the rendering logic that is unexpected?

Tom Gewecke said...

I am sure it is because correct display requires an AAT font, and Apple did not want to itself provide a font which would generate incorrect display for users. That is what Arial Unicode will do for lots of scripts, because it has only OpenType features and not AAT.