Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

The Many Languages of Mac OS X Text

On the Mac, 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.

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. Just drag one of the languages to the top of the list to select it as the target language, as shown in Figure 5-3.

Note

You can mix English with right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic. There’s even a split-cursor option that makes the pointer flip directions at the boundary between right-to-left and left-to-right text.

Gem in the Rough: Instant Accented Characters, Courtesy of the iPhone

It’s been a problem since the dawn of computing: How do you produce accented characters—lïké thêsë—on a keyboard with only 26 letter keys?

For most of computing history, the answer has been: You bring up some special palette on the screen, or you memorize key combinations. And yes, those options are still available in Mac OS X.

But in Lion, there’s a new option, which Apple stole from its own iPhone software: Hold down the letter you want accented—e, for example. After a moment, you get a pop-up panel of possible accented versions. You can click the one you want, or, if you’d rather not lift your hands off the keyboard, you can type the corresponding ...