A guide to Indian languages on Mac OS X
Mac OS X Leopard has decent support for Indian scripts and languages. Out of the box, Leopard comes with fonts and keyboards for Devnagri, Gujarati, Gurmukhi and Tamil.
Reading Indian language text:
There is nothing that you need to install to be able to correctly view data in these scripts. For example, if you visit the BBC’s Hindi website, you’ll be able to read the page withoud downloading or installing additional fonts (provided of course, you know how to read Hindi 
). Firefox 2 on Mac OS X used to be problematic here, but Firefox 3 renders Hindi text correctly.
Enabling keyboard for your language:
The next thing you probably want to do is to type in one of these scripts. Start System Preferences and choose the International applet.
Click on the Input Menu tab which lists input menthods and keyboards for different languages. By default this list is sorted by Input type, which can make it somewhat difficult for you to locate the language of your choice. So the first thing that you should do is to sort the list by the name of the language, by clicking on the Name header.
Scroll down and check the keyboards you want. Also check the “Show input menu in menu bar option”. Mac OS X Leopard typically gives you two keyboard layouts for most Indian languages. One of them is a phonetic layout (labeled as QWERTY in the list of keyboards), while the other follows a more traditional typewriter-style (usually INSCRIPT) scheme. The exception here is Tamil which ships with Tamil99 and Anjal layouts. The phonetic layouts are the easiest to use as you can type something as you would roughly type it in English, and get the equivalent Indic representation on the fly. For example, to type दीपक, all I need to do is to key in dIpAk. If you know the iTrans transliteration scheme, you’ll feel right at home.
Typing in your language
If you followed the steps above correctly, you’ll now see a small colored icon (next to the speaker icon) in your menu bar. Since default keyboard layout on Mac OS is US English, you’ll see the US Flag as the icon.
Clicking on it will show you a pull-down menu of keyboard layouts that you had just enabled. Select and click the keyboard you want to activate it. The icon will change to reflect your selection and you can start typing in any application that supports Unicode and Indian languages like TextEdit.
Viewing the keyboard layout
If you want to see the layout of currently active keyboard, go back to the Input Menu tab in the International applet. Check the Keyboard Viewer option in the list and close the window.
Now below the list of languages in your menu bar, you’ll also see an option called Show Keyboard Viewer.
Clicking it will show you the layout of the keys on the currently active keyboard. Of course, this applies only to INSCRIPT/Tamil99/non-phonetic keyboards. If you have a phonetic keyboard selected (the icon for a phonetic keyboard has a blue dot in it), you’ll only see the default English layout.
Since most Indian languages have more characters than can be accommodated on a standard QWERTY layout, only a subset of them are visible by default (just like the English layout shows only lower-case or upper-case letters at any given time). Hold the Shift key to see the rest of them.
This finishes our introduction to using Indian languages on the Mac OS. Leopard is still missing support for some important Indian scripts – most notably – Assamese, Bengali, Kannada, Oriya, Telugu and Malayalam. The infrastructure (UNICODE, shaping engine etc.) to support these languages is already there. Indeed, fonts and keyboards for these languages are available through 3rd parties, but they often lack the quality and fit-and-finish of Apple supported languages. I’ll cover enabling these not-so-out-of-the-box languages in Mac OS X in a future post.