Tibetan on the Mac

More Unicode

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 10:55:52 -0700

Well that was a weird year, but now I intend to get back to this blog. I got reenergized by going to the Tibetan Language Institute summer session in Montana. The forest fires made the skies seem like we were on the border of one of the hot hells.

Unicode

Mon, 29 May 2006 11:59:10 -0700

If you want to produce Tibetan in a native Mac environment, Unicode seems to be the way to go. With the combination of Xenotype’s Tibetan Unicode fonts and Chris Walker’s Extended Wylie keyboard, it is quick and easy. I was able to whip out this Losar card in a few minutes using the Pages program. As Chris points out on his excellent site, Xenotype fonts seem to be the only Unicode fonts that work well with the Mac at this time. And they do not have the dreaded broken word problem that shows up with most Mac programs when using Tibetan fonts. I will do a full report on this in the near future. The current Xenotype font is easy to read, but is not very appealing to my eye. They have a couple of good-looking fonts in the works, including a very nice dbu-med font. They don’t have the Sanskrit stacks supported yet in the dbu-med font, but I hope that will be coming soon. You can also see another dbu-can font that they have in the works on their main page, if you scroll down to the bottom.

Xenotype has includes a keyboard with their fonts, but for me, a Wylie converter is much faster to use.

It is important for we Mac users to support the small number of developers who are helping us with Tibetan. It would clearly be in Xenotype’s interest to continue developing Mac fonts if we buy them. Tony Duff of TCC spent a lot of time and money on developing Mac version of his dictionary software, but I don’t think he has sold enough yet to make it worth his while.

Sambhota

Sat, 27 May 2006 14:03:15 -0700

Sambhota is a lovely font collection that is available from Nitartha, that I have used for many years. However when it comes to using it on the Mac, the software is getting quite ancient. They had a nice converter, but it was an OS9 program. It would run in OSX under in the Classic mode, but the new Intel Macs don’t support Classic. I understand that they are working on updating this.

The easiest method of using Sambhota seems to be in Windows, using their Microsoft word templates. It seems that Office for the Mac does not support there templates currently. You can’t hold this against Nitartha, because the TCC Word add-ins never were able to work either.

Jskad - Free, easy to use, and powerful

Thu, 25 May 2006 18:11:48 -0700

Jskad is an easy to use program to input Tibetan Language text. Since it was written in Java, it is cross platform. It can use the Tibetan Machine Web font or Tibetan Machine if you are on Windows. There are several keyboard maps that you can use, Extended Wylie, TCC #1 and #2, and Sambhota One. The THDL website has descriptions of these here. The Wylie converter handles Sanskrit stacks more readily than Tibetan Doc, but you do not have any of the formating features or integration with the Illuminator dictionary. Jskad also has converters for ACIP, TM, TMW and Unicode. It saves text in rtf format, which can be opened in word processors for formating. I think it is a good way to get started because it is free and it works!

Tibetan Computer Company

Tue, 23 May 2006 16:58:22 -0700

Why would I want to start with a Windows program? The Tibetan Computer Company offers a very highly developed method of working with Tibetan Texts. It seems to run flawlessly in both the virtual Windows environment of the Parallels Desktop, and booting into Windows with Boot Camp. You can type texts with either of two Tibetan Keyboards, or a pretty good Wylie converter. I type English at work and find typing Wylie much easier. The other keyboards might be easier for native speakers who have not previously learned to touch type. Unfortunately, the Wylie converter does not have much support for a lot of Sanskrit stacks, especially compared to other converters. (In case you don’t know, Wylie and its variants are ways of representing Tibetan words in Roman characters.) I particularly like to be able to select a word in the text I just typed and instantly read the definition from the Illuminator dictionary (Sold separately).

After typing in some Tibetan, you can then save it in the TCC proprietary format, or the rtf format, which can be opened by almost any program capable of working with text. When you save to rtf you can keep the text in the Tibetan Machine (or other TCC fonts), but you also have a couple of very important options. You can convert the text to Tibetan Machine Web font, which can be used on the Mac or on the web, or you can convert to Unicode.

The Tibetan Machine Web font is quite usable on the Mac. It is available for a free download from the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library project of the University of Virginia.

The Tibetan Machine Unicode font unfortunately has some problems on the Mac, apparently because of some problems with Apple implementing Unicode. However you can then change to a Mac Unicode font such as those published by Xenotype. (More on these later.)

TCC also has a Power PC native Tibet Reader which will run the dictionary programs, but I don’t think they have the latest version of the Illuminator dictionary set up for the Mac. The program runs just fine under Rosetta on the Intel Macs.