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Unicode Diacritic Fonts

Transliteration of many Asian languages requires the use of special diacritic marks above or below the standard letters of the Roman alphabet. Tibetan religious texts often include substantial portions of transliterated Sanskrit, which when represented in Romanized transliteration require such diacritic marks. These can be displayed through a widening range of diacritic fonts. Until recently, diacritic fonts were encoded in ASCII and required multiple font files or code pages to render the full range of diacritics. The advent of Unicode has, on the other hand, provided a way for all the necessary diacritic characters to be contained in a single font, while Unicode’s increasing usage is evidence of its enduring viability. The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library, therefore, strictly adheres to the Unicode standard. All diacritics displayed on our web pages are encoded in Unicode and require the user has a suitable Unicode font installed.

However, not all Unicode fonts contain the necessary characters. To properly display all the diacritic marks used in Indo-Tibetan studies, a Unicode font must contain the following character ranges:

• Basic Latin: U+0000 – U+007F (View Unicode Chart)
• Latin-1 Supplement: U+0080 – U+00FF (View Unicode Chart)
• Latin Extended-A: U+0100 – U+017F (View Unicode Chart)
• Latin Extended-B: U+0180 – U+024F (View Unicode Chart)
• Latin Extended Additional: U+1E00 – U+1EFF (View Unicode Chart)

These ranges cover all the diacritic characters represented in the diacritic chart, which contains those diacritics used in Indo-Tibetan studies apart from IPA symbols. The IPA symbols have their own Unicode block: U+0250 – U+02AF (View Unicode Chart), and it is recommended that one choose a diacritic font which includes these as well. Several of the most useful fonts are listed in the section below. More detailed information on Unicode fonts, their installation, use, and availability can be found at Alan Wood's Unicode Resources. For information on how to install and use Unicode fonts, see below.

THDL-Recommended Diacritic Font

While Arial Unicode MS is the most comprehensive Unicode font and contains all the necessary diacritic characters necessary for Asian Studies, the Arial family of fonts is in general less aesthetically appealing then some of the other font family. For this reason, THDL recommends the use of:

• Times Extended Roman: View info | Download.

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Available Unicode Fonts

The following is a list of Unicode fonts that contain some or all of the necessary characters for Indo-Tibetan computing. This list attempts to cover the known available fonts on both the Windows and Mac operating systems. However, users with further information on available fonts or other platforms such as Linux are encouraged to contact the THDL at thdltools@virginia.edu. Each font is listed by name, with its availablilty, quality, and a description of the characters it covers. At present, the ratings are provisional. (View list of Macintosh Unicode fonts.)

Windows Unicode Fonts

Arial Unicode MS

• Availability: Shipped with Windows XP and Microsoft Publisher 2002.
  • About
  • Alternative Download
• Quality of appearance: Good for both screen and printing.
• Diacritic coverage: All — Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B and Latin Extended Additional.
• Other script coverage: IPA Extensions, Combining diacritic marks, CJK and many other non-Latin scripts.
• Rating: Very Good.

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Code 2000

• Availability:
  • Shareware for $5 from James Kass' Does Your Browser Support Multiple Languages?
  • Alternative Download
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance is mediocre. Printed appearance fair.
• Diacritic coverage: All — Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional.
• Other script coverage: IPA Extensions, Combining diacritic marks, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari and other Indic fonts, CJK.
• Rating: Average.

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Courier Extended

• Availability: Available from the fonts page of the Bahá'i Computer & Communication Association.
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance fair and printed appearance fair.
• Diacritic coverage: All — Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B and Latin Extended Additional.
• Other script coverage: Undetermined.
• Rating: Very good.

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Courier Ind Uni

• Availability: Available from John Smith's FTP site.
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance poor and printed appearance good. Lack of hinting makes web pages in this font unreadable.
• Diacritic coverage: Contains all necessary diacritics for Indo-Tibetan studies.
• Other script coverage: None.
• Rating: Below average.

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Gandhari Unicode

• Availability: Freely available from the British Library/University of Washington's Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project. See the "Font's & Keyboard" section of their download page, and choose GU.zip. Fonts come with a MS Word template that provides shortcuts to input diacritic characters.
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance is somewhat irregular on smaller sizes; printing quality is excellent.
• Diacritic coverage: All — Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, some of Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional. (Does not have S or s-cedilla.)
• Other script coverage: IPA Extensions, Combining diacritic marks, Modern Greek, some further diacritic combination in the Unicode Private Use Area.
• Rating: Very Good.

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Gentium

• Availability: Freely available from from SIL.
• Quality of appearance: Excellent.
• Diacritic coverage: All — Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional.
• Other script coverage: IPA Extensions, Combining Diacritical Marks, Greek, and Cyrillic.
• Rating: Excellent.

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Helvetica Ind Uni

• Availability: Available from John Smith's FTP site.
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance fair and printed appearance good. Lack of hinting makes web pages in this font difficult to read.
• Diacritic coverage: Contains all necessary diacritics for Indo-Tibetan studies.
• Other script coverage: None.
• Rating: Fair

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JGaramond

• Availability: Available from the JGaramond site.
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance good and printed appearance good.
• Diacritic coverage: Contains all necessary diacritics for Indo-Tibetan studies.
• Other script coverage: None.
• Rating: Good.

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NCS Ind Uni Roman

• Availability: Available from John Smith's FTP site.
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance fair and printed appearance good. Lack of hinting makes web pages in this font difficult to read.
• Diacritic coverage: Contains all necessary diacritics for Indo-Tibetan studies.
• Other script coverage: None.
• Rating: Fair.

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Palatino Ind Uni Roman

• Availability: Available from John Smith's FTP site.
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance fair and printed appearance good. Lack of hinting makes web pages in this font unreadable.
• Diacritic coverage: Contains all necessary diacritics for Indo-Tibetan studies.
• Other script coverage: None.
• Rating: Fair.

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Palatino Linotype

• Availability: Shipped with Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Also available from University of Houston and the Bible Research website.
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance excellent and printed appearance excellent.
• Diacritic coverage: Most of the necessary diacritics for Indo-Tibetan studies. Though Alan Wood's page says it covers Latin Extended Additional, it does not appear to have the dot-below and dot-above characters.
• Other script coverage: Cyrillic, Greek, Latin..
• Rating: Below Average due to lack of essential diacritics.

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SImPL

• Availability: Free download from Phil Chastney's An APL Unicode Font.
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance is fair. Printed appearance fair.
• Diacritic coverage: All — Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and most of Latin Extended Additional (missing l/L macron with dot-below, m/M dot-above, and z/Z dot-below).
• Other script coverage: Greek, Cyrillic.
• Rating: Average.

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Tahoma

• Availability: Shipped with all Windows systems. Updated in 2004.
• Type: San Serif
• Quality of appearance: Screen and printed appearance both good.
• Diacritic coverage: Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended Additional.
• Other script coverage: Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai.
• Rating: Very Good.
• Note: Prior to the 2004 edition, Tahoma did not include the dot-below diacritics.

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Times Extended Roman

• Availability: Available from the fonts page of the Bahá'i Computer & Communication Association.
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance fair and printed appearance good.
• Diacritic coverage: All — Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B and Latin Extended Additional.
• Other script coverage: Undetermined.
• Rating: Excellent. Recommended.

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Times Ind Uni

• Availability: Available from John Smith's FTP site.
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance poor and printed appearance good. Lack of hinting makes web pages in this font unreadable.
• Diacritic coverage: Contains all necessary diacritics for Indo-Tibetan studies.
• Other script coverage: None.
• Rating: Below average.

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Thryomanes

• Availability: Freely available from The Language Page.
• Quality of appearance: Screen and printed appearance both good.
• Diacritic coverage: All — Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional.
• Other script coverage: IPA Extensions, Combining diacritic marks, Greek, Cyrillic.
• Rating: Very Good.

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Titus Cyberbit

• Availability: Available for free download from TITUS (Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text und Sprachmaterialien)
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance is irregular because of varying thickness. Printing appearance is very good.
• Diacritic coverage: All — Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional.
• Other script coverage: IPA Extensions, Combining diacritic marks, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, most CJK and a few other non-Latin scripts. A large number of various diacritic combinations with both capital and lowercase letters is found in the Unicode Private Use Area.
• Rating: Good.

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URW Palladio HOT

• Availability: This Hybrid OpenType (HOT) font from Ulrich Stiehl's Transliteration and Devanagari Fonts for Sanskrit replaces URW Palladio UNI font. URW Palladio Hot is not presently available for download, but is being tested by friends of the developer. Eventually, it will be made available in 3 different versions:
  1. Hinted OpenType font in TTF format (TrueType hints).
  2. Hinted OpenType font in OTF format (PostScript hints).
  3. Unhinted, very compact OpenType font in TTF format.
• Quality of appearance: Not yet reviewed.
• Diacritic coverage: All — Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional. Based on the ISO 15919 Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts into Latin characters specifications.
• Other script coverage: Not yet evaluated.
• Rating: Not yet reviewed.

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VU Times

• Availability: Download from Unicode Fonts for Romanized Viet-Pali-Sanskrit.
• Quality of appearance: Screen appearance is good except some of the dot-above and dot-below characters are not well hinted or scalled.
• Diacritic coverage: All — Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional.
• Other script coverage: Some Arabic and Hebrew.
• Rating: Good.

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Macintosh Unicode Fonts

Unicode is fully implemented only with Mac OS X. Previous operating systems on the Mac do not have the capability to provide the full range of diacritics used in Asian studies. The information provided here is a summary of information found at Alan Wood's Unicode fonts for Macintosh OS X computers. The fonts listed have not been reviewed by the THDL and therefore are not rated.

Gentium

• Availability: Freely available from from SIL.
• Quality of appearance: Excellent.
• Diacritic coverage: All — Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional.
• Other script coverage: IPA Extensions, Combining Diacritical Marks, Greek, and Cyrillic.
• Rating: Excellent.

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Lucida Grande

• Availability: Included with Mac OS X 10.1
• Quality of appearance: Not yet reviewed.
• Diacritic coverage: Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, and Latin Extended Additional.
• Other script coverage: Combining Diacritical Marks, Greek, and Cyrillic.
• Rating: Not yet reviewed.

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Displaying Unicode diacritics in browsers on Windows

Windows: Internet Explorer 5

1. Download a Unicode font. If it is in a .zip file, unzip it and store in a temporary folder.
2. From the Start Menu, choose Settings, then Control Panel.
3. Open the Fonts folder.
4. Place the Unicode font in the fonts folder
   or
   From the File menu of the fonts folder, choose Install New Font ...
   And choose the Unicode font file.
5. Then, open Internet Explorer.
6. Choose Internet Options from the Tools menu.
7. Click the Font button.
8. Choose the Unicode font just installed as the Web page font.

Windows: Netscape 4.7

1. Download a Unicode font. If it is in a .zip file, unzip it and store in a temporary folder.
2. From the Start Menu, choose Settings, then Control Panel.
3. Open the Fonts folder.
4. Place the Unicode font in the fonts folder
   or
   From the File menu of the fonts folder, choose Install New Font ...
   And choose the Unicode font file.
5. Then, open Netscape.
6. Choose Character set from the View menu.
7. Choose Unicode (UTF-8).
8. Choose Preferences from the Edit menu.
9. Choose the Font category.
10. Change Encoding to Unicode.
11. Change Variable width font to Arial Unicode MS.

Displaying Unicode diacritics in browsers on the Mac OS X:

Macintosh: Netscape 6

Netscape 6 on the Macintosh is the easiest to use because no set up is required other than installing a Unicode fonts.

1. Download and install a Unicode font.
2. Download and install Netscape 6, if not already installed.
3. Run Netscape 6.

Printing Unicode Fonts:

If some of the characters do not print correctly but come out malformed or as a completely different character, try the following:

1. From the printer's dialog box, choose Properties and check the box that says "Print True Type fonts as graphics".
2. Make sure you have the latest version of the printer's driver installed.

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