Tibetan Fonts

See also Tibetan Unicode

This is an overview of the currently available Tibetan computer fonts

Fonts compatible with the ISO 10646 / Unicode Standard for encoding Tibetan characters: Tibetan Unicode

With Unicode people can enter text using different Unicode compatible Tibetan fonts, and switch between them, without needing to convert from different encoding formats.

OpenType Tibetan Fonts at THDL

• Tibetan Machine Uni - based on TCC / Tony Duff's Tibetan Machine font.
  
• Jomolhari font - designed by Christopher Fynn based on Bhutanese manuscript examples. Suitable for printing texts.
  Also available from: the Free Tibetan Fonts Project and Google Fonts.

On Windows XP & 2000 these fonts currently work with Office 2003 sp1 - though you will also need to install the EWTS EWTS Unicode keyboard or a another Tibetan Input Method. For information on using the font with other applications please see: THDLs Instructions for using Tibetan Unicode Fonts in Windows.

Windows Vista fully supports both fonts without additional software.

TCRC Youtso Unicode Free Tibetan Font

• TCRC Youtso Unicode – 442 characters (1017 glyphs) in version 1.0 offered for free download from Poppdict.Com by the Tibetan Computer Resource Centre (TCRC), Dharamsala.

Nitartha-SambhotaDege Unicode Font

Nitartha Sambhota have released the SambhotaDege Unicode font - the first release of their Sambhota Unicode fonts.

Unicode fonts for Mac OSX

Two Tibetan fonts Kokonor and Kailash come with Mac OSX 10.5 and above.

Unicode Tibetan in PDF files

When creating PDF files with Unicode Tibetan fonts it is advisable to use a font where the glyphs have been named according to Adobe's Glyph Naming Convention - otherwise you may not be able to reliably cut and paste Unicode text from Tibetan PDF documents and you may not be able to properly search or index Unicode Tibetan PDF documents.

Tibetan Machine Uni, Jomolhari and Nitartha-Sambhota Dege have the glyphs named according to Adobe's standard. Microsoft Himalaya does not.

Tibetan Unicode Fonts in InDesign

Jomolhari ID is a cross-platform version of the Jomolhari font by Chris Fynn which works under Windows, Linux, Mac OSX (10.5) and in Adobe's InDesign (CS3 & CS4) without the need of a plug-in.

MetaDesign Solutions also produce a plug-in called IndicPlus for Adobe InDesign which enables support of OpenType fonts for Indic Scripts and Tibetan - in Adobe InDesign CS2 and CS3. This plug-in should be useful for those needing to prepare printed and PDF publications in this application using other Unicode Tibetan script fonts.

Thomas Phinney has an article World-Ready Composer in Adobe CS4 which tells you how to enable support for complex scripts in Adobe CS4.

Platform Independent Fonts

See also how to create a Platform Independent Tibetan Unicode Font.

Fonts using legacy encodings

Nithartha-Sambhota

See their main web site for more information how to purchase this font set. Nitartha-Sambhota have also recently released a Unicode version of their font.

Tibetan Computer Company (TCC)

See their main web site for more information how to purchase their font sets. Just now these font sets do not support the Tibetan Unicode standard.

THDL Free Tibetan Fonts

See: their main web site for how to download various free fonts provided by THDL and Trace Foundation.

• The Tibetan Machine font is an original font by Tony Duff, licenced and placed in to the public domain by the Trace Foundation.
  
• The Tibetan Machine Web font is a version of the same font re-encoded to support display of Tibetan text on legacy browsers.
• The Tibetan Machine Uni font is a version much extended and re-encoded by THDL to support the Tibetan Unicode standard (see above).