Hi,
Will wrote:
Hi is there a mac os x leopard hotkey for changing language, as
every so often my language for the keyboard keeps changing without
me going to the status menu and choosing british or French so am
wondering if anyone else has noted this behavior
and Simon replied:
Will, I hven't noticed it. It is not good if it should be
happening. There's no hot key to change keyboard language layout
although it would be very useful.
Will, open System Preferences and go to the Keyboard & Mouse menu.
In the Keyboard Shortcuts pane, interact with the outline and take a
look at the shortcuts assigned under the "Input Menu" items to
"Select the previous input source" and to "Select the next source in
the Input menu", then VO-keys+down arrow to view the shortcuts
assigned under "Spotlight" to "Show Spotlight search field" and "Show
Spotlight window". These had the same shortcut key assignments on my
system (Tiger) until I changed the "Input Menu" assignment for
"Select previous input source" to Option-Shift-Space and for "Select
next input source in the Input menu" to Option-Space.
1. Navigate to System Preferences (VO-keys+M for the menu bar; arrow
down; type "S Y" for "System Preferences" and press return)
2. Navigate to the Keyboard & Mouse menu (type "K E" and return; VO-
keys+Space to open menu)
3. Navigate to "Keyboard Shortcuts" (VO-keys+Right Arrow to "Keyboard
Shortcuts" and VO-keys+Space to select the tab)
4. Navigate to the Outline (VO-keys+Right Arrow) and interact (VO-
keys-Shift-Down arrow).
5. The Input Menu options are near the end of the list, so you can
use VO-keys-Fn-Shift-Right Arrow (VO-keys-Shift-End on a desktop) to
move to end of the list (scrolling, if needed), and either VO-left to
the descriptions column and VO-up to these entries, or else use VO-
keys+I to bring up item chooser menu, type "I N P" to select "Input
Menu" and return.
6. VO-down to read descriptions of the Input Menu options and VO-
right for the shortcut assignments. The Spotlight shortcut options
are just a few lines below the Input Menu options.
7. To change a shortcut assignment, double-click the shortcut and
press the new shortcut keys:
7a. From the shortcut key field route mouse cursor to VoiceOver
Cursor with VO-keys-Command-F5 (or VO-keys-Command-Fn-F5 on older
laptops) if you don't have your VoiceOver navigation set with "Mouse
cursor tracks VoiceOver cursor"
7b. Double-click with VO-keys-Shift-Space by holding down the
Control, Option, and Shift keys while tapping the Space bar twice
quickly. (Leopard users with full-size keyboards and Numpad
Controller turned on can double-click by pressing the "5" key on the
numeric keypad twice quickly in succession.)
7c. Press the new combination (e.g. Option-Shift-Space for "Select
the previous input source" or Option-Space for "Select the next input
source in the Input menu").
8. Repeat the steps in item #7 for each keyboard shortcut you wish to
re-assign, then stop interacting with the outline (VO-keys-Shift-Up
Arrow)
9. Navigate back to the main "System Preferences" Menu by tabbing to
the "Show All" button and press (VO-keys+Space)
10. Navigate to the "International" menu (type "I N" and return;
press VO-keys+space to open the menu)
11. Navigate to "Input Menu" (VO-keys+Right Arrow to the "Input Menu"
tab and VO-keys-Space to select)
12. Navigate (VO-keys+Right Arrow) past the table of selected
(checked) input keyboards to read a summary of Input Menu Shortcuts.
Your two shortcuts should be listed with their new assignments:
Select previous input source: Option-Shift-Space
Select next input source in menu: Option-Space
In Tiger, my Input Menu Options are followed by Input Source Options
with radio buttons to select either of the two items listed:
Use one input source in all documents
Allow a different input source for each document
In Leopard, based on information from Simon in an earlier set of list
posts, and confirmed by the following article from the Multilingual
Mac web page, the default is to only use one input source in all
documents, and the list of Input Source Options is missing:
http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2007/11/os-x-105-leopard-fix-for-missing-
input.html
(OS X 10.5 Leopard: Fix for Missing Input Menu Item)
This means you can change your input keyboard language, but the
shortcut uses the same changed keyboard for all documents, so you
can't open a second TextEdit window in Leopard and set this to a
French keyboard using the shortcut while your first window is set to
an English keyboard. I think you have to go up to the menu bar and
change the input keyboard language. In Tiger you can just Option-
Space to the language you want in each TextEdit window, and have a
different input keyboard in each one. (You don't hear VoiceOver
announce the change in the Input keyboard language, though.)
Apparently, before Tiger there was a keyboard shortcut that allowed
you to switch between keyboard languages if you used more than one --
e.g., if you checked options for a French keyboard or a German
keyboard under the Input tab of the International menu under System
Preferences. The problem is, when Apple introduced Spotlight in
Tiger, they assigned the "Command-Space" shortcut key that had been
used to switch language input keyboard to Spotlight. As far as I
know, the same keyboard shortcuts are assigned to both selecting the
previous and next input sources in the Input menu (switching input
language keyboards), and to showing the Spotlight search field and
Spotlight window in both Tiger and Leopard. The Spotlight shortcuts
probably take precedence, but I'd bet that's the source of Will's
occasional problems.
Switching to the shortcuts I gave above also allows you to use
shortcut keys to switch the language keyboard for your input.
Remember that keyboard input language only affects how you type
accents, special symbols, and the like (or characters in the case of
non-Latin keyboards for Russian, Greek, Japanese, etc.). It does not
ensure that words you type in a foreign language are pronounced
correctly, or even at all -- that requires using a voice which will
pronounce the words correctly using text-to-speech for French,
German, etc. Changing keyboard input language also doesn't mean that
TextEdit, Mail, etc. will spellcheck using a French, German, etc.
dictionary. For that, you have to launch an application window with
the desired language localization, e..g, by typing:
/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit -AppleLanguages
'(fr)'
from a Terminal window to start a TextEdit session with a French
localization. This is one of the methods posted a couple of weeks
ago to make an application start in a different language localization
from the default one for the system.
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
