Tibetan is a syllabic alphabet much like those of India and consists of consonants with vowel signs. The Tibetan script also contains symbols for "conjunct consonants" representing a sequence of consonants.
Historically, Tibet was a center for Buddhist religion and scholarship, and the language included Sanskrit loan words. Recent political events have caused closer ties with China, so that some Chinese encoding schemes and fonts include Tibetan characters.
For more information on the script, see the following pages.
If you have your browser configured correctly, the Web sites above should display the correct characters. If you have difficulties, see list below for font and browser configuration instructions.
Penn State Tibetan Unicode Test Page
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 .
OS X Note: Depending on your OS version, not all vowel signs may be correctly placed.
See also
Browsers which support all Unicode are recommended. However, some vowel marks may be incorrectly placed depending on your font and platform.
OS X (10.4/Tiger): To view the correct vowel mark placement, copy and paste the text from the browser into TextEdit (free from Apple).
If you see Roman character gibberish instead of a South Asian script, you will need to manually switch from Western encoding view to the Unicode encoding under the View menu of your browser.
Several freeware Tibetan utlities are also available.
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.
Apple does not provide a Tibetan keyboard, but several freeware Tibetan keyboards are available.
Apple does not provide any Tibetan utilities, but third-party software may be available.
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.
Tibetan numeric Unicode entity codes can be used for small pieces of text when other methods to not work.
NOTE: Free downloads not tested
