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Tibetan Scripts, Fonts & Related Issues

Any serious use of Tibetan fonts in computers must use "Unicode" fonts. Unicode, or the Universal Character Set, is the global standard for representing the world's scripts in a computing context. Thus our documentation is all focused on Tibetan Unicode - fonts, keyboards, and so forth. Though scholarly work around the development of Tibetan Unicode predates the release of Microsoft Vista for nearly a decade, Windows Vista was the first mass-market operating system providing built-in support for Tibetan Unicode giving it a kick-start into the world-wide stage. Shortly after the release of Vista, Apple followed suit by including Tibetan Unicode based fonts and keyboard methods in the Leopard release of the Macintosh OSX operating system. Users of various Linux distributions have built-in support for Unicode Tibetan even earlier. Unicode is thus now the standard for Tibetan computing. For details on older, non-Unicode systems, please consult Legacy Tibetan Font Systems.

Although one of Unicode's great benefits is that you can use documents across the major computing platforms - Windows, Macintosh, Linux - the specifics of support, input methods, and other aspects are often specific to the operating system. Thus we provide summary pages for each of the world's three major operating systems below - if you are new to Tibetan computing, choose your operating system and start there: