Typing Tibetan

1. For Leopard:

OS X 10.5 comes with 2 fonts for Tibetan (Kailasa and Kokonor) and 3 keyboard layouts -- Otani, QWERTY, and Wylie.

Info on Otani is here, QWERTY is here. Wylie input is based on a special transliteration system to Tibetan which is described here.

2. For Tiger:

OS X 10.4 does not come with fonts and keyboards for typing Tibetan, but they can be added.

There is only one font that will display correct Tibetan with normal Tiger OS X apps (but not AppleWorks or MS Office). It comes with the Tibetan Language Kit from XenoTypeTech (XTT):

http://www.xenotypetech.com/osxTibetan.html


You can, however, create correctly encoded (but poorly displayed) Tibetan by using available Windows fonts:

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Tibetan.html

If you use OpenOffice/X11 (not OpenOffice 3), these Windows fonts will also display correct Tibetan.

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/index.html


To input Tibetan in 10.4 you need to add a custom keyboard to your Mac. The XTT kit comes with 3 layouts. If you are not using the kit, this site has two excellent layouts for download, Wylie and Dzongkha:

http://www.tibetanportal.com/tibetanportal/pages/keyboards/macoskeys.html

For OpenOffice/X11, you need to use Dzongkha.

You can find two "home-made" layouts, Tibetan and TibetanUSS, here:

http://idisk.mac.com/thgewecke-Public?view=web

For OpenOffice/X11 you need to use the one called Tibetan.


3. For useful info on some current encoding questions regarding Tibetan, see:

http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2006/09/precomposed-tibetan-part-2-stuck-in.html


4. For Tibetan on Windows, see:

http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2006/02/stacking-diacritics-and-complex.html

http://www.thdl.org/tools/input.html


http://www.thdl.org/xml/showEssay.php?xml=/tools/fonts/unicode-explain-eng.xml&m=all

5. For pre-Unicode Tibetan (RFA, SaveTibet.org, Tibet.net) see:

http://web.otani.ac.jp/cri/twrp/TLK/index.html
http://www.nitartha.org/software.html

Tibetan Machine Web

http://www.savetibet.org/ti/help.php

6. For a Tibetan Test Page:

http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Test/Tibetan.html