Mac Resources

Apple Ships Support for Hawaiian in OS X

On August 24, 2002, Apple Computer shipped OS 10.2, also known as "Jaguar". Included in this release was native, system level support for Hawaiian, in the form of a Hawaiian keyboard and inclusion of the ‘okina and kahakō in a number of the fonts that ship with OS 10.2. While we consider this a significant development, and a seed that will bear fruits in the coming years, it does not drastically affect our current work. Unicode is not support in Microsoft Office for Mac OS X, not is it supported in a lot of other programs. But support for Unicode on OS X will grow, and as it does our Hawaiian support will already be in place and functional. The graphic to the right shows the Hawaiian Unicode keyboard under the "International" control panel, under the "Input Menu" choice. If you have more than one keyboard selected here, you will see a keyboard menu appear to the right of the last menu item in whichever application you are running. If you have selected the Hawaiian keyboard as displayed to the right, it will appear as a choice under this keyboard menu. If you are running an application that does not support Unicode, the Hawaiian and other Unicode keyboards will be disabled. This status is indicated by the name of the keyboard appearing in grey, and it will not be selectable.

Currently, one application that we have tried and have found it to support Unicode is "TextEdit," the replacement for "SimpleText" that was found in Mac OS 9. The graphic to the right shows the Hawaiian language displayed using OS X's "Lucida Grande" font. You should also note the use of the ‘okina and kahakō in the file name that appears at the top of the text window. You can also use the ‘okina and kahakō in file names when you save them, or use them in the OS X desktop. Be aware - if you give a file a name with a Unicode character and switch to OS 9, you may not be able to read that file name.

Support for HI Fonts under OS X

Read this documentation to use the older HI fonts for Macintosh under OS X.