Tuesday, October 16, 2007

OS X Leopard Adds 3 Localizations and 15 Keyboard Layouts

OS X 10.5 Leopard was made available for preorder today, and Apple also published its tech specs and new features.

Tech Specs

Features

These indicate that 3 new localizations -- Russian, Polish, and Portuguese (Portugal) -- have been added to the previous 15. The full list is now English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Traditional Chinese, SimplifiedChinese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Polish.

New languages mentioned as supported via keyboards/fonts are Tibetan, Kazakh, Uyghur, Kurdish, and Jawi (Malay in Arabic script).

New spell checkers are Russian and Danish.

Dictionary.app now includes Japanese (with a translation facility) in addition to English.

Here is a list of the language-related items from Apple's page describing Leopard's features.

10 comments:

Magnus Lewan said...

Did you see this?

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#international

Paul D. said...

What happened to the reports that an Emirati firm was localizing Leopard into Arabic?

Paul D. said...

Just started reading the features list. A 200,000-entry Japanese dictionary! I'm pretty happy about that, and I hope it's a sign Apple is going to focus more on Japanese in the future.

Tom Gewecke said...

Thanks, Magnus, did not see that and will revise my entry.

Regarding Arabic, I suspect that, presuming it actually gets done, it will wind up being provided locally, like the Russian localization was for several years.

Magnus Lewan said...

I think some things are confusing, though. They claim that pinyin and zhuyin are "new" Chinese input methods. Pinyin has been there for years and so has zhuyin I think (I never use zhuyin myself). Hopefully they talk about improved versions.

And then I tried understanding what JIS2004 and Hyogaiji were. They seems to reference old Japanese characters, but how I cannot tell. Typographic additional features?

And still no support for vertical script or furigana. Sigh...

Anonymous said...

hey, I am a student studying chinese...do you guys now any programs...(or if the New Leapord thing) will use the chinese pinyin on iworks? Like will i be able to type in the pinyin and the character will come up?
Thanks,

Tom Gewecke said...

OS X already has pinyin input for both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. You can find info on how to use it here:

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/input_methods.html#Apple

Anonymous said...

Hi, Whats that mean that Kurdish is supported? does it means that I can finally write in kurdish or just read or what? Regards

Asso said...

hello
thank you for you information. i'd like to intstall kurdish keyboard and kurdish fonts. can help me?

Tom Gewecke said...

See this note:

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2007/01/typing-kurdish.html