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Apple Opens Chinese Language Support Community

Apple has just opened a Chinese-language set of user-to-user discussion forums (the Apple Support Communties), which you can get to at http...

Alternative Text-to-Speech App for iOS

For those who want different voices than what Apple provides via the Speak Selection function in iOS, I have recently come across an app Vo...

Bug In OS X Azeri Keyboard Layout

The Azeri keyboard layout provided by Apple with OS X has no question mark, which can be very inconvenient. Possible remedies are a) Creat...

Reading and Typing Traditional Mongolian Script

Traditional Mongolian is perhaps the most difficult script to display on a computer. Much like Arabic, Mongolian characters are connected an...

Typing Nuoso Yi in iOS

An earlier article provided some info on how to input Nuoso Yi in OS X. Thanks to Dennis Walters you can now find a way to do the same on i...

Reading And Writing Syriac

Syriac, a major literary language in the Middle East from the 4th to 8th centuries, is not yet included in OS X. In order to read Unicode te...

Apple Online Store Adds Keyboard Language Choices

Apple's US Online store traditionally has only offered English, French, (Western) Spanish, and Japanese keyboards when you tried to orde...

Cuneiform Script Cyrus Cylinder Touring US

The Cyrus Cylinder, a clay tablet from 6th century BC Babylon, inscribed with a declaration in the name of Cyrus the Great, began a tour of...

Bug in Apple Kannada Font

The font Kannada Sangam displays the wrong glyph for the sequence RA plus Virama (U+0CB0, U+0CCD). Instead OS X users should switch to the...

Play & create video trivia with friends

A great way to practice English while having fun alone or with friends. You can challenge your friends with the existing trivia or you can c...

Bugs In iOS Cyrillic Font

A poster in the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that the font Market Felt Thin, one of the three available for the Notes App, uses...

Language Capabilities of Adobe InDesign/Illustrator

This blog page provides some useful info on maximizing the language capabilities of these Adobe products.

Free English video lessons

Engvid offers more than 490 free English video lessons for beginners, intermediate and advance students. There are a lot of topics, from Eng...

Chinese OCR in iOS Devices

One of the coolest features of the iPhone/iPod/iPad for Chinese users is the ability to simply photograph signs and texts and use the device...

New Chinese Fonts in OS X 10.8

One of the added features in Mountain Lion promoted by Apple is "eight new fonts, from modern to classical, for Chinese users". I...

Japanese-English Dictionary Missing in iOS 6

For some reason the Japanese-English dictionary that is available in OS X and was present in iOS 5 got lost in iOS 6.0 and is still missing ...

Font Variation for Japanese Hiragana "ri"

Mac OS X users who input Japanese may notice that the Hiragana character for "ri", U+308A, can appear in two different forms, sho...

iPad Turkish Keyboard Bug

Since iOS 6, there is a Turkish F screen keyboard layout available on the iPad. Unfortunately it is not really usable, because the key for ...

New Mac Font Editor

Type Light 3.2x, a new free font editor for OS X, has just been released, and a paid version with additional features is expected later this...

Adding Dictionaries to Dictionary.app

As of OS X 10.8.2, Dictionary.app has modules for reference dictionaries in US English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, ...

Emoji Notes

Emoji symbols were added to Unicode in its version 6.0 of October 2010, and Apple incorporated font support in iOS and OS X 10.7 shortly the...

iOS Word Processor for Arabic/Hebrew

Because Pages for iOS has bugs which make it largely unsuitable for writing Arabic/Hebrew, I have been looking at other word processor apps ...

Secrets of Unicode Sorting

Recently a poster in the Apple Support Community pointed out some odd OS X sorting behavior for Latin accented characters, at least when ...

Info On Apple-Provided Fonts

Apple currently publishes two notes listing the fonts provided with its products: For OS X 10.8, HT5379 For iOS 6, HT5484 Regarding conditio...

Paper Version of Unicode Standard Again Available

Unicode stopped publishing the hard copy edition of the Standard after Version 5.0, but has recently again made the core specification avail...

Multilingual Mac Web Site Updated

I've recently updated and simplified the reference web site, Unleash Your Multilingual Mac. Comments and corrections by viewers are alw...

Bugs in OS X Khmer and Myanmar Keyboard Layouts

Languages like Thai, Khmer, and Myanmar do not separate words with spaces, so achieving correct line endings can be a challenge. Normally t...

Emoji Name List

Both OS X and iOS have a very large number of Unicode Emoji characters available, either via a dedicated keyboard layout (iOS) or the Charac...

Unicode Bug in Pages

A poster in the ASC forums recently reminded me of a weird long-standing bug in the Pages app : You cannot directly input the Unicode chara...

New Mongolian Keyboard Layout

Thanks to the firm Mountain Edge, a new Mongolian Cyrillic keyboard layout is available for OS X. It follows the MS Windows pattern and can...

listenings

Cambridge English TV

Some of you are preparing the PET, the First Certificate, the Advance or the Proficiency Tests of Cambridge University. These series of vid...

Bugs in Apple's Telugu Font

A contributor to the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that the Telugu Sangam font provided by Apple in iOS and OS X has incorrect c...

jrubies Listen and Watch

Twominuteenglish

At the airport, taking a taxi, ordering a pizza, greeting people or saying goodbye, you can listen, practice and learn English with these v...

New Braille Input Apps Available

For some time now there has been no way to use the standard keyboard to input Braille via the 6-key Perkins Brailler system -- the previousl...

Myanmar/Burmese Bug in iOS 6

It's been reported in the Apple discussions, and I have verified it myself, that trying to view Unicode Myanmar/Burmese webpages, emails...

iBookstore Adds Language Support

The latest iTunes Producer Guide, version 2.8, indicates that a number of new languages are now supported by iBooks and the iBookstore using...

iBooks 3 Adds Support for Chinese/Japanese/Korean

At the Apple event Oct. 23, 2012, a new version 3 of iBooks was announced, including vertical layout and correct page turning for CJK script...

Tools for teachers

The British Council and the BBC offer this place for teachers.As they say: " This is the place to come for tools to help you inside and...

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