Adding Kannada support to Mac OS X
As mentioned earlier, Mac OS X (10.5) comes with support for Devnagri (which technically enables Hindi, Marathi; and depending on where you are in India, Konkani), Gujarati, Gurmukhi and Tamil. Support for other Indian languages is available from 3rd parties and is usually free. Here is how you can add Kannada support to your Mac.
If you visit a web-page that uses Kannada (Unicode), you’ll only see a bunch of “null-glyphs”:
When you see null-glyphs for a language, it usually means that the font required to display that language is missing. While on Windows the null-glyphs appear like a empty box, null-glyphs on Mac include a character indicating which language we are dealing with (in this case the null glyph shows Kannada “Ka”). This being Mac, you can expect a little more. If you increase the font size to something like 120 points, you’ll even see the Unicode range (in case of Kannada that would be 0xC80 – 0xCFF) of the language mentioned on the null-glyph itself!
As you can see, the null-glyph on Mac tells you a lot. Nice touch! but you still need the correct font if you want to read Kannada. Now some work was done by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore on a Unicode font called Kedage, which you can download from Nick Shank’s webpage. Copy the font to ~/Library/Fonts (switch to Finder, press Command + G, and type in ~/Library/Fonts and press Enter). You should now be able to see Kannada correctly. Here is the Kannada equivalent of “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” (thanks Dr. Pavanaja, thanks Pooran for digging it out for me.) as it renders on my machine:
Nick Shank’s page also has a couple of keyboard layouts. Download any one of them (the first one mimics the ISCIIINSCRIPT layout of Windows). Unzip the file (if you are using Safari, the file will be automatically unzipped when the download completes) and copy the Kannada.bundle file to ~/Library/Keyboards. To use it, follow the instructions for enabling Indian language keyboards, the Kannada keyboard should now be listed in the keyboard layouts list:
Happy typing!