How to use Tibetan fonts and keyboard map in Yudit Original: Gregory Mokhin 2002-10-10 Last modified: 2003-02-05 Before you proceed: Tibetan support in Yudit is at early stages now and is helpful for testing purposes mainly. You can type Tibetan using Wylie transliteration and you will have proper conversion to Unicode symbols as you type. In many cases you will have also proper display of Tibetan glyphs. But you can also see something unexpected, unless you have an OpenType Tibetan font installed. Introduction Yudit ( http://www.yudit.org ) is a free Unicode Editor, it can be used for editing text in Tibetan script (including Tibetan proper and Dzongkha, used mainly in Bhutan) in Unicode. Pre-requisites 1. Download the latest version of Yudit from www.yudit.org Follow installation instructions from http://www.yudit.org. 2. Download utibetan.ttf font from *** and copy it into the /usr/share/yudit/fonts or ~/.yudit/fonts UTibetan.ttf font is available under GPL. It was developed by Gregory Mokhin , based on glyph outlines of LTibetan.ttf font by Pierre Robillard, who is the author of LTibetan font and made this font available under GPL (see http://www.interlog.com/~pierrer ). Configuration After installing Yudit and the fonts you need to configure the fonts. First invoke and exit Yudit. This will create a ~/.yudit/yudit.properties file. Edit a font property in this file, to add your Tibetan font, for instance: yudit.font.TrueType=arial.ttf,utibetan.ttf... Select Tibetan for input in Yudit gui. This is a clustering kmap - which means that a whole cluster needs to be entered to get proper shaping. Tibetan text rendering. It is important to keep in mind the difference between proper encoding of a text (that means, correct Unicode values for typed letters and syllables) and its rendering and display by a word processor. Yudit is capable of using glyph substitution and positioning required for proper display of Tibetan, but only in case the font itself has OpenType tables (technically speaking, GSUB and GPOS) and other OpenType features necessary for the rendering engine to work properly. See the Appendix. Utibetan.ttf is an incomplete version of the font. It contains glyphs for basic Unicode points for Tibetan but it has no OpenType features that are necessary for proper Tibetan support. These features are under development. There exist other Tibetan fonts that do support OpenType features, and Tibetan texts typed with Yudit will be displayed properly when these fonts will be available for public download by their authors. Typing Tibetan Use Wylie transliteration to type Tibetan, for example, try typing ye shes mig gcig dri ma med to see what manifests. For learning Tibetan Wylie transliteration one might want to consult an excellent document prepared by Prof. David Germano and THDL team ( http://www.thdl.org ) defining their extensions to classical Wylie scheme, which is called "Extended Wylie." See http://iris.lib.virginia.edu/tibet/tools/ewts.pdf (but note the errata at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=646583&group_id=61934&atid=502515). Thanks to David Chandler for informing me about this. Note that there is no standard method for typing Wylie yet, but the differences concern mainly tibetanized Sanskrit stacks and mantras. Please send your comments to Yudit developers and me. Grisha Mokhin, Moscow, 05 February 2002 ================================================= Appendix. Technical notes. A number of Tibetan letters are combined from top to bottom, and the Unicode chart for Tibetan does take into account that property of Tibetan language. Unfortunately, the existing Unicode chart for Tibetan is not sufficient for proper display of all Tibetan syllables, and, similar to Indic scripts, it requires OpenType glyph substitution and positioning tables to be implemented and applied for font rendering. Different variants of subjoined letters should be used for different initial syllables. That is, "r" in "kr", "khr", "tr", "thr" should be a different variant of subjoined "r", because its position in the syllable depends on the initial (upper) part of the syllable. Same about subjoined "ya", "wa", and "u". One should also take into account mantric syllables, originally coming from Sanskrit, that are quite common in Tibetan texts. Actually, OpenType support for Tibetan is easier than for Indic scripts. The main registered OpenType layout features that need supporting for Tibetan script are: 'ccmp', 'blws', 'abvs' - all belonging to GSUB (glyph substitution) 'blwm', 'abvm', 'kern' - all GPOS (glyph positioning)