Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

The Many Languages of Mac OS X Text

Apple has always taken pride in its language-friendliness. You can shift from language to language on the fly, as you type, even in midsentence—without reinstalling the operating system or even restarting the computer.

Lion’s facility with language, though, goes the extra overseas mile. It lets you type vertical Japanese and Chinese text; includes fonts for 20 more non-Roman alphabets (including the ones you need for five Indian languages); offers “filtering by tones, ordering and filtering by radical or stroke count, and improved pinyin-han conversion accuracy” (you have to be a Chinese speaker to appreciate those tweaks); and much more.

First, tell your Mac which languages you’d like to have available. Open System Preferences→Language & Text. On the Language tab, you see a listing of the languages the Mac can switch into, in the corresponding languages—Français, Español, and so on.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: The Least-Known Typing Feature of Mac OS X

This may come as a shock if you think you know your Mac pretty well, but here goes: Mac OS X actually offers system-wide autocomplete of big words, just like the iPhone.

We’re not talking about the spelling checker, and we’re not talking about text substitution. We’re talking, you start typing a word, and the Mac finishes it for you. It’s ideal when you’re in a hurry, when you’re not sure how to finish a word (is it independance or independence?), or when you’re trying to solve a crossword puzzle. It works in ...