Hi Yuma, You wrote: > > Yes, Alex is the only audible voice provided by aple, and i have > several infovox languages. > > If the local settings cna be changed on the fly, as well as the > keyboard, then i am in business. At the Multilingual Mac page, the last item in the article on language changes in Snow Leopard states:
"Hitting Space while holding down Apple/Command will produce a list of active keyboard layouts in the center of the screen, which can be selected via the mouse or the up/down arrows. 10.6 has no new localizations for OS X or any new languages for reading and input. Also it appears that File > Get Info no longer has a Languages tab, which makes it hard to run an app in a language other than that of the OS. A workaround may be here." The first item about using Command-Space to switch keyboards sounds as though Snow Leopard has gone back to using this shortcut sequence to default for input language switching instead of for Spotlight. The last item refers to the fact that in Leopard (and in Tiger), when you select any app, and do a Get Info (Command-I), one of the fields tells you about Language localizations, and if you uncheck all the language options but one, you can force the application to open in that language even if it is not your default language. (By that I mean that the window title bars, the menus on the application's menu bar, the help, and spell checking will be in that language localization). You can also make your Mac launch an application in another language localization from terminal by typing the full path to the app within its application bundle and setting a 2-character switch for the language. For example, typing a command like: /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes -AppleLanguages '(de)' & where the two-letter language argument for "-AppleLanguages" is enclosed in parentheses and also with single quotation marks, and will force iTunes to launch in a German localization. (This was used to check a bug in iTunes a few months ago where connecting an iPod Nano 4G did not let VoiceOver access the tabs for selecting music and podcasts under German localization, but using English localization worked. The bug has since been fixed.) Change the "d e" to "e n" for English, or to "f r" for French. Here's a Mac OS X HInts page on "Temporarily change system language via AppleScript" that might give you some other ideas: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061229203902170 For example, since the Mac has a language preference order, you could switch preferences for an app in Terminal (has to be done with the app closed or your command will be overwritten) with a command like this: defaults write com.apple.mail AppleLanguages '("jp", "en-US")' (note all single and double quotation marks). This would tell the mail app to open first in Japanese rather than (U.S.) English (and would allow only the two localizations). Reversing the order of the arguments would make the mail app open in English first. (There seem to be other two-letter abbreviations for Japanese floating around depending on the keyboard input type, like "ja" so do some exploring.) Or, you could just launch your app on the command line with the language options as before, for example to open TextEdit with Japanese localization: /Applications/TextEdit/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit -AppleLanguages '(ja)' & (Warning, you may get errors if you try to spawn multiple processes -- if you already have a TextEdit session running. The ampersand at the end spawns the process as a background task.) The workaround mentioned on the Multilingual Mac page was a link to a free software program called "Language Switcher". I tried it a few months ago under Leopard, and it seemed slightly unstable and still a work in progress. The GUI isn't entirely accessible to VoiceOver but you can use it by typing the name of the app you want into the search field. It seems to construct a list of applications by looking in your Applications directory and listing every file there as an app, which is a problem if you've ever stored a "README" description folder for an application in the same directory. The first thing I would do, if using this app, is go into the View menu on the status bar and display a table of all the apps this program has found and (painfully) uncheck nearly all of them except for the very few programs you might want to run under a different language localization (like Mail, TextEdit, etc.). By default, the first of the checked apps (alphabetically) is shown as the chosen app in the GUI, and the pop up button will show you available language localizations which you can choose. The Language Switcher app is available at: http://www.tj-hd.co.uk/en-gb/languageswitcher/ I would personally use Terminal if you're comfortable with it. The only Japanese voice that I'm aware you can just get for the Mac is the DTalker one; the CereProc voices seem to be in beta, and being developed under custom contract for one of the Japanese telecommunication firms. HTH Cheers, Esther --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
