Mac OS X 10.5 to be released in 10 days

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Eric Rasmussen

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Oct 16, 2007, 6:31:58 PM10/16/07
to Chinese Mac
The Apple site was updated last night with new information about Mac
OS X 10.5 "Leopard" and a release date, October 26.

Here is the section on new "International" features in Leopard:

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

Note the following:

"Spotlight Language Support
... A new Chinese tokenizer intelligently parses the search
characters to factor in their relationship and meaning with one
another, ensuring the most relevant results. ..."

"New Input Methods
... Leopard also offers two new input methods for Chinese — Pinyin
and Zhuyin. ... And localized help is provided for all of the CJK
input methods, including English."

Now that the release is imminent, I think it's okay add a few details:

1. The new Pinyin input method is a traditional-Chinese version of
ITABC with tone numbers instead of strokes. I believe the new Zhuyin
input method is basically the same, though I have not confirmed that.
ITABC itself (which still uses strokes) has been updated to some
extent, with some changes to key sequences, etc.

2. There may be improvements to the Plug-in Input Methods mechanism.
I believe that the old limit (7) on the length of input strings is
gone. I'm not sure if there is a new limit. Anyhow, we'll see.

3. Supposedly Chinese text-to-speech is coming in Leopard (in
VoiceOver). But I have not seen any sign of it. Probably that will
come later, in an optional update, I guess.

Something that's missing:

1. No complete CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B font. So scholarly
Chinese Mac users will continue to be reduced to borrowing Extension
B fonts from Windows (for high-quality fonts, anyhow). The good news
is that the Windows Vista Extension B fonts validate and seem to work
perfectly -- no warnings, even with TTC fonts. I'm not 100% sure
about MingLiU/PMingLiU, though -- I myself will stick to SimSun for
Extension B -- MingLiU/PMingLiU comes with too much baggage.

My hope is that Apple is holding off because they plan to add a
single font that contains both Extension B and Extension C when the
latter is released next year -- it was supposed to be finished this
year, but has been delayed. I hope they will add it as an optional
update to Leopard, but I fear we will not see it until OS X 10.6.

2. It is probably a good sign for 10.6 that Apple has made
significant improvements to the Japanese IMs and fonts. If the past
is any guide to the future (a dubious proposition), then we may be
able to look forward to "advanced predictive input" for Chinese in
10.6. But in fact, we won't have to wait that long for that! Glider
is building it (via Heima Shenpin) into QIM 1.4 and beyond...

ER

Tom Gewecke

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Oct 16, 2007, 6:47:36 PM10/16/07
to chine...@googlegroups.com

On Oct 16, 2007, at 3:31 PM, Eric Rasmussen wrote:

>
> 3. Supposedly Chinese text-to-speech is coming in Leopard (in
> VoiceOver). But I have not seen any sign of it. Probably that will
> come later, in an optional update, I guess.

Early Apple info on Leopard made a reference to an improved text-to-
speech ability to cover more languages. I was surprised to see that
the Universal Access section of the new Leopard features page has
omitted any mention of that dimension, and presumably no free non-
English voices are being provided, even for Spanish, which I think
was part of OS 9.

TenThousandThings

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Oct 16, 2007, 7:22:18 PM10/16/07
to Chinese Mac
On Oct 16, 6:47 pm, Tom Gewecke <t...@bluesky.org> wrote:
> Early Apple info on Leopard made a reference to an improved text-to-
> speech ability to cover more languages. I was surprised to see that
> the Universal Access section of the new Leopard features page has
> omitted any mention of that dimension, ...

The old page is still in Google. The exact quote was: "VoiceOver also
includes support for two-byte languages such as Japanese and Chinese."

No sign of it now. My guess is we'll see it around the .3 or .4
release.

Kerim Friedman

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Oct 16, 2007, 9:04:05 PM10/16/07
to chine...@googlegroups.com
Before I saw this e-mail I'd compiled my own list of language related
changes, which go beyond what is in the internationalization section:

Unicode support for AppleScript

Japanese-English dictionary and Japanese language support in the
Dictionary App (presumably Chinese could be added eventually)

Language collections in Font Book

Two new Chinese input methods: Pinyin and Zhuyin (and localized help
for all CJK input methods).

A new Chinese tokenizer for Spotlight, which helps "intelligently
parse the search characters to factor in their relationship and
meaning with one another."

Improved international support for Terminal.

-kerim

王龍駒

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Oct 17, 2007, 5:14:54 AM10/17/07
to chine...@googlegroups.com
On 10/16/07, Kerim wrote:

> Two new Chinese input methods: Pinyin and Zhuyin (and localized help
> for all CJK input methods).

I'm curious how these are "new" (aside from modified/improved
functionality) since there's already Pinyin and Hanin (which does
Zhuyin) in Tiger.


.

glider

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Oct 17, 2007, 5:27:54 AM10/17/07
to Chinese Mac
"New" means you can input traditional Chinese with Pinyin. You can't
do that in Tiger.

Eric Rasmussen

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Oct 17, 2007, 8:36:55 AM10/17/07
to chine...@googlegroups.com
> > I'm curious how these are "new" (aside from modified/improved
> > functionality) since there's already Pinyin and Hanin (which does
> > Zhuyin) in Tiger.

They are "new" because they are completely different input methods
from what came before them. Only the names are the same. [Hanin is
still available, by the way.]

The old "Pinyin" input method in Tiger hadn't been updated in any
fundamental way since System 7.5. Both it and the old "Zhuyin" (last
seen in Panther) were based on the "Show Associated Words" approach,
where you input the first hanzi and then select from a list of the
remaining hanzi in words that start with the first hanzi.

As I noted earlier, the Pinyin (and I believe also Zhuyin) input
method in Leopard is based on ITABC. It is Pinyin + tone (optional),
unlike ITABC, which is Pinyin + stroke (a.k.a. "shape," also
optional), but otherwise it is the same (except, of course, that it
uses traditional-form hanzi instead of simplified). In fact, unless
this has changed in the 10.5.0 release, you can access ITABC's Jiegou
Pinyin ("Chaibai") input and single-hanzi Pinyin + stroke GB18030
character-set input from the traditional-Chinese Pinyin input method
just like you can from ITABC. [Basically, this is just a convenience,
so you don't have to switch to ITABC to get there. Apple does not
consider them part of the traditional-Chinese Pinyin input method.]

Eric

王龍駒

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Oct 17, 2007, 12:33:55 PM10/17/07
to chine...@googlegroups.com
On 10/17/07, Glider wrote:

> "New" means you can input traditional Chinese with Pinyin. You can't
> do that in Tiger.

Yes, you can. I do it all the time. Zhuyin Ershi is essentially
Pinyin, and Roman also works, with tones even. Still only one
character at a time, tho.


.

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