Ethiopic is a syllabary originally developed for Classical Ge'ez (Ethiopia), the South Semitic language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but is now used for several languages of northeastern African including Amharic (modern Ethiopian), Tigrinya and others.
Oromo was once written in the Ethiopic script, but has been written in the Roman alphabet since 1991.
unicode.ethiozena.net (Ethiopic News Headlines)
Browsers which fully support Unicode are the strongly recommended. Click link in list to view configuration instructions. You will be asked to match a script with a font.
Apple does not currently provide a keyboard for this language, but Macintosh OS X users can use the Unicode Hex Code Keyboard (available only for Unicode aware applications such as TextEdit) may be of some use.
Commercial or shareware keyboard utilities may also be available for either platform.
SIL Org has Unicode fonts and keyboards for both Windows and Mac. Scroll to the bottom of the page for keyboard utilities.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are meta data tags which indicate the page of a language, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
One option is to use FrontPage, Netscape/Mozilla Composer or Dreamweaver and change the keyboard to the correct script. Make sure you specify the encoding in the Web page header.
Another option is to compose the basic text in an international or foreign languags text editor or word processor and export the content as an HTML or text file with the appropriate encoding. This file could be opened in another HTML editor such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver an edited for formatting.
Ethiopic numeric Unicode entity codes can be used for small pieces of text when other methods to not work.
