Problems With Tibetan In Windows

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Problems with Unicode Tibetan in Windows

Contributor(s): Than Grove, Steven Weinberger

Problems with Tibetan Font Not Displaying Correctly in Firefox

If Tibetan font displays as square boxes or the letters do not stack properly, configure Firefox in the following way:

Tools > Options > Fonts & Colors > click “Advanced” button > “Fonts for” dropdown menu and then select “Other languages” and set Serif, Sans Serif, and Monospace all to TibetanMachineUni (the Unicode Tibetan), and then click “OK,” and then Tools > Options > Fonts & Colors > click “Advanced” button > “Fonts for” dropdown menu and then select “User Defined” and set Serif, Sans Serif, and Monospace all to TibetanMachineUni, and for both of these set “Default character encoding” to UTF-8, and then unselect “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above.”

Adobe Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop etc

Tibetan may not display properly in Adobe applications like InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Again there is no specific support for Tibetan in Adobe's own OpenType engine (used on all platforms) but this can be worked round by including extra lookups in the font which get applied by the Adobe engine but ignored by Uniscribe (the Adobe engine ignores almost all the features normally used for Tibetan so the tables can co-exist without much trouble). Jomolhari-ID was specifically designed to fix this problem, but we have not tested it ourselves and so we cannot confirm that it works. The Bejing "Qomolangma" fonts also may have the same design as Jomolhari-ID.

Printer Problems with Unicode Tibetan

There is an isolated report of a problem where everything displays fine on the screen, but it won’t print out. This was reported with Uniscribe installed at system level and also in the common files of Microsoft Office, while running Windows XP and using an Epson Photo Stylus R210. It has not been checked with the same computer and other printers. There are similar reports with Unicode Cambodian – see external link: http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=en/node/984.

It was suggested that problems like this in Windows frequently end up being traced to a bug or limitation in the printer driver and/or graphics driver and how these interact with various DLL's that are part of Windows GDI. (A problem related to a graphics driver can affect printed output, even if the text displays on screen OK).

To replicate the problem we would need to know: the exact version of windows you are using; what hardware you are using - especially which graphics card or chipset; the model of printer you are using and the exact version of your graphics and printer

Does the problem occur in one application - or all? Can you print Tibetan text from Notepad?

If I encountered a problem like this here are some of the things which I would try:

1. Uninstall printer and graphics drivers and re-install them in case either has become corrupted or had default settings changed. (Also try to find out if there are updated versions of these drivers).

2. Try a different printer. Preferably a different model & manufacturer.

3. If you are using a laser printer it may have several different drivers - e.g. HP laser printers often come with a plain driver, a PCL6 driver, and a PostScript (PS) Driver - in that case, try each one.

4. If the printer options allow try printing "text as graphics"

5. If you cannot print directly try "printing" first to a PDF file using Acrobat Distiller or the built in PDF Generator in OpenOffice which works well. (Some other 3rd party PDF makers do not work with Unicode.) Then try printing the PDF file from Acrobat or Acrobat Reader.

Provided for unrestricted use by the external link: Tibetan and Himalayan Library