Thanks to Ozgur Sahoglu and Sir William Arbuthnot for their technical assistance.
Although modern Turkish is written in the Roman alphabet, it is encoded as Unicode or ISO-8859-9 and requires special font and keyboard support separate from languages like Spanish and French.
Modern versions of many fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, Tahoman Times CE (Mac OS X) or Palatino (Mac OS X) are Unicode fonts and contain the letters needed for this language. it is recommended you transistion to the newer Unicode fonts whenever possible.
See Slovo Info Unicode Fonts for additional Unicode fonts supporting Turkish.
In earlier centuries, Turkish was written with the Arabic alphabet. See the Arabic page for details on Arabic support.
As of Windows XP Microsoft provides a Turkish Q and a Turkish F keyboard utility which allows you to type extra Turkish letters. If you wish to simulate a Turkish keyboard, do the following:
See Detailed Instructions for more detailed instructions with screen capture images. See the Micorosoft Keyboard Layouts for the position of the keys.
You can use the following ALT key plus a numeric code can be used to type a Latin character (accented letter or punctuation symbol) in any Windows application. More detailed instructions about typing accents with ALT keys are available.
NOTE: Codes with numbers over 255 are only available in Word 2003. Users with older versions of Windows or not using may need to use the Character Map utility.
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The new CE fonts for OS X (Times CE) as well as new versions of Palatino, Times New Roman, Arial and others now contain Turkish letters. It is recommended that you transition to these fonts whenever possible.
Apple now has several Turkish keyboards, includig a QWERTY keyboard and QWERTY PC keyboard, but they only work for Unicode Aware applications such as Microsoft Office 2004, Text Edit, Dreamweaver MX, Netscape 7 Composer and others.
See instructions for activating a Macintosh keyboard for more details.
If you are working with a Unicode aware application such as Microsoft Office 2004, Text Edit (free with OS X ), Dreamweaver or Netscape 7 Composer /Mozilla Composer you can activate the U.S. Extended keyboard and use the following option codes along with the older accent codes.
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Note: The Unicode Hex Input keyboard must be active in order to use the numeric codes; otherwise only the numbers appear.
There are also a number of freeware and shareware Turkish fonts. You can check the Summer Institute for Linguistics Fonts in Cyberspace for more details.
For the Web, you can use the Unicode numeric codes listed below.
For print work, there are a number of freeware and shareware fonts for Turkish. You can check the Summer Institute for Linguistics Fonts in Cyberspace for more details.
For the Web, you can use the Unicode numeric codes listed below.
Please note which fonts are needed for each platform before viewing instructions to configure your browsers in the Preferences or Tools menu. Most browsers are recommended, but older browsers like Netscape 4.7 may need more adjustments.
All modern browsers support this script. Click link in list to view configuration instructions. In some cases, you will be asked to match a script with a font.
NOTE: The following test Web sites were selected randomly. They are in no way endorsed or critiqued by Penn State.
Test Web Site - www.fotograf.net/tr/ (Turkish Photos)
If you have your browser configured correctly, the Web sites above should display Turkish letters.
Manually Switch Encoding
If you see some unusual letters instead of the appropriate Turkish letters, you will need to manually switch from Western encoding to one of the Turkish encodings or Unicode under the View menu of your browser.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
See Using Encoding and Language Codes for more information on the meaning and implementation of these codes.
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.
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.
Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you want to type çarşı you would type ¸arşı. These numbers are also used with the Windows Alt codes listed above.
Be sure the appropriate Encodings and Language Tags are used.
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NOTE: Because these are Unicode characters, the formatting may not exactly match that of the surrounding text depending on the browser.
Many modern texts use American style quotes, but if you wish to include European style quote marks, here are the codes. Note that these codes may not work in older browsers.
| European Quote Marks | |
| « | « (left angle) |
|---|---|
| » | » (right angle) | ‹ | ‹ (left single angle) |
| › | › (right single angle) | „ | „(bottom quote) | ‚ | ‚(single bottom quote) | “ | “(left curly quote) | ‘ | ‘(left single curly quote) | ” | ”(right curly quote) | ’ | ’(right single curly quote) | – | – (en dash) |
| — | — (em dash) |
