View Macintosh System 9 Instructions
Macintosh System OS X comes with various utilities, but you need to activate them before they can be used. Unlike System 9, you no longer need to install separate Language Kits. Note that installing OS X upgrades from Apple will allow you to be updated on new.
Different viersions of OS X are named after different animals. See table below.
| Version | Code Name |
|---|---|
| 10.8 | Mountain Lion |
| 10.7 | Lion |
| 10.6 | Snow Leopard |
| 10.5 | Leopard |
| 10.4 | Tiger |
| 10.3 | Panther |
| 10.2 | Jaguar |
Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Devanagari, Gujarati, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Hawaiian, Greek (modern), most Western and Central European languages
Western: Belgian, Danish, Dutch, French (France/Canada/Switzerland/), German (Germany/Austria/Switzerland), Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil/Portugal), Spanish, Swedish
Cyrillic: Bulgarian, Bulgarian Phonetic, Russian, Macedonian, Ukrainian
Central European: Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanisn, Polish, Slovak
Multiple options for Japanese, Armenian, Cherokee, Cree, Pashto, Persian, extended Unicode keyboards for Finnish, Faeroese, Irish, Welsh, Serbo-Croatian, and others.
Multiple options for Chinese and Korean, Russian Phonetic, Polytonic Greek, Tamil input palette, Nepali, improved Keyboard Viewer.
Tibetan and others
U.S. International - PC (has the same codes as the Windows U.S. International keyboard), others may have been added.
Support for South Asian languages have been added or enhanced. Specifically Bangla, Kannada, Khmer, Kurdish, Malayalam, Myanmar, Oriya, Sinhala, Telugu, Urdu.
New utilities for Georgian have also been added.
Some very old versions of Macintosh programs originally developed in a pre-OSX environment (e.g. Office 2001) may not be compatible with some Unicode keyboards, however this problem has been resolved in almost all upgrades and is non-existant in OS X native programs.
To activate different keyboards in OS X , do the following.
NOTE: If you are using foreign language scripts in "Classic"
environment software, you may also need to install Language
Kits.
Input Menu listing available keyboards and input palettes (OS X10.3-10.5)
Input Menu listing available keyboards and input palettes in OS X 10.6
Student Computing Labs - For the OS X machines in the Student Computing labs, a number of keyboards have been activated already including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Icelandic (Old English), and several others.
Other keyboards can be activated by following the instructions above, but they must be reactivated every time you log in.
To switch keyboards:
).
Use the dropdown menu to select a script or language.The Keyboard Viewer shows the locations of different characters on a keyboard, but not variations in fonts. Those are in the Font Book utlitity.
). and using the drop down menu to switch to another keyboard.
This utilitiy allows you to see variations in appearence between fonts. See the OS X Install and Manage Fonts page for more information on Font Book utility for more information.
For locations of different characters on alternate keyboards, use the Keyboard Viewer.
Note: This utility was available in older versions of Macintosh, but was phased out as of Panther (10.3).
You can use the utility in OS X to generate many Unicode characters by manually inputting the hexadecimal code. Other options include saving word processor files as Unicode or UTF text.
Several sites list links to freeware keyboard utilities for languages not supported by Apple. Thes sites include:
To use these files, you should install them in the Library/Keyboard Layouts folder (all users) or the ~Library/Keyboard Layouts folder (one user only). Reboot and Activate from the System Preferences International panel.
Read the instructions for each keyboard layout for details on installation and use.
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