Georgian is a Kartvelian (South Caucasian) language from the Republic of Gerogia (or Sakartvelo) and neighboring countries, and has very rich set of consonants. Gerogian is part of a set of languages originating in the Caucasian Mountains, but is the most politically powerful Kartvelian language. Other Caucasian languages include Chechen and Abkhaz.
There were actually two alphabets created for Georgian - the Mkhedruli alphabet and the older Asomtavrule/Nuskha-kchuri alphabet. The earliest written Gerogian texts date from the early 5th century.
In order to integrate foreign scripts into your computer, you must set up "keyboard" utilities in your operating system. Keyboards will allow you to switch between typing English and other languages in word processors and Web tools. This process will also make sure the correct fonts are installed are availble for Windows or Macintosh.
As of Spring 2005, the international word processor Global Writer is available in the Student Computing Labs. This allows users to easily switch keyboards, including phonetic keyboards which mimic a QWERTY keyboard.
CLC Student Computing Labs: To open Global Writer, go to the Start » Internatinal Language Support » Unitype Global Writer.
Global Writer is available from Unitype for personal purchace.
Windows XP - Microsoft includes a Georgian keyboard, but they may need to be installed from the Windows System disk. See the Windows Complex Scripts Keyboard Instructions for details on how to activate the keyboard. To see where the critical keys are, go to the Microsoft Keyboard Layouts Page
Windows Vista Only - Microsoft includes a Georgian QWERTY keyboard in Windows Vista.
As of version 10.3, Apple does not provide a Georgian keyboard, but there are some freeware utilities available. Note that OS X applications only work with Unicode aware applications like Microsoft Office 2004, Text Edit, Dreamweaver MX 2004, and others.
See the Unicode chart for Georgian to see OS X Hex codes and HTML entity codes. Note that the correct Unicode font must be installed in order for the codes to work. See the Browsers Section for details.
Additional freeware fonts can be downloaded from from the sites below. Note that not all these fonts may work on System 9 for Macintosh, but will work in Windows and OS X .
For best results, use a browser which supports Unicode and a wide range of older encodings. Click link in list to view configuration instructions. You will be asked to match a script with a font.
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.
Georgian numeric Unicode entity codes can be used for small pieces of text when other methods to not work.
