While surfing through System Preference, I was surprised to find out that Leopard now supports Vietnamese Input much better 😡 Nothing need to be configured, no external driver, no extra keyboard layout, no 3rd party software; you choose the language then type – pretty easy isn’t it 😀
Just to help some Vietnamese friends who indeed need to type Vietnamese on Mac OS X. To enable it, follow these simple steps:
1. First go inside System Preference and open International
2. Go to tab Input Menu, tick on “Vietnamese Keyboard”. You also want to check on “Show input menu in menu bar” for faster access. (Look at the tiny icon, it’s Van Mieu, Temple of Literature 😛 )
3. From the menu bar, select the input method you want. For me, I choose “Simple Telex”
4. Now you can type Vietnamese character whenever you need. Example: open TextEdit, type something:
and save it into any format (RTF, Word 97, Word 2007 …). It will be readable across multiple platforms
Now you can type documents, blog, or do whatever you want in Vietnamese by simply switching the Input type to Vietnamese.
Note 1: a quick feedback from my friend: if the font you use it’s not Unicode, you may see the vowel and consonant displayed in different style. It’s due to the font itself, pick up another Unicode font then 😀
5. Since you will have 2 input methods: English and Vietnamese (Telex), you might want to find a hot key to switch between those 2, Mac OS makes it very simple for you.
Again open System Preference/Language & Text:
Click Input Sources/Keyboard Shortcut to open the menu:
Once the menu opened, find “Keyboard & Text input” in the left list, tick onto the last 2 choices (You can change the combo key as you wish, for me I choose Ctrl + Space bar, that will allows you to switch between all the input methods):
After set there, you now can use the combo shortcut to change the keyboard input quicker than choosing by mouse 🙂
Note 2: all of above information is valid till latest Mac OS X (Snow Leopard), and of course will be applicable toward future too ^^