[February
2, 2010]
Standard Unicode fonts contain all the diacritical marks that are
needed for reproducing most Indian languages in transliteration
(at
least the languages with which I work most often: Sanskrit,
Kannada,
Tamil, Prakrit, Pali). An additional advantage of using Unicode
rather
than the older coding schemes is that the texts can be read and
processed further on any computer with an operating system that
supports Unicode: not only Mac OSX, but also Linux, and the later
versions of MS Windows.
For the successful Indological use of Unicode with Mac OSX, one
needs
- a Unicode keyboard driver
- at least one Unicode font
- application software that
supports
Unicode
Problematic
issues
Unicode fonts with all the necessary diacritical signs which are
needed
for Indological writing come in various kinds, for instance,
TrueType, OpenType, AAT (Apple Advanced Typography), and in the
Mac-specific dfont format. In general,
Mac OSX supports all these kinds of fonts.
However, often there are difficulties when we Indologists wish to
use
fonts for Indian scripts. OSX comes with fonts and keyboard
drivers for
(Deva)Nagari, Tamil, Gujarati and Gurmukhi. These fonts have been
made
specifically for the
font
rendering
engine that is a part of the OSX operating system. This
engine
(called ATSUI - Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging)
determines how
combinations of signs in complex scripts are produced
correctly (or not). For instance, the combination 'consonant +
short i'
in north Indian scripts should be rendered with the sign for the
short
'i' coming first, being followed by the consonant sign. If one
attempts
to use an OpenType or TrueType Nagari font that was designed for
use
with Windows™, the rendering will most likely be incorrect (unless
one
uses
XeTeX - see below).
Keyboard
drivers
A good keyboard driver for typing the Indologically
necessary
diacritics, which is included with OSX, is, miraculously,
"Inuktitut-Nunavut". "U.S. Extended" does practically the same,
but
apparently did not allow one to type a long vocalic r under OSX
10.3;
however, it does under OSX version 10.5, with the handy and
totally
unintuitive combination ALT-a + r, just as the Inuktitut layout
(thanks to Marco Franceschini, Bologna, for pointing this out).
Dr.
John Smith, Cambridge, offers a keyboard driver via his FTP site (
here,
where
good fonts can also be found - see
below),
which
is very
convenient to use for Sanskrit; it also has the necessary signs
for
Dravidian languages (to be composed, using 'dead keys': alt-= for
a
macron over Dravidian long e and o, and alt-+ for the underbar
with l,
r and n).
If one
wishes to create one's own keyboard driver,
SIL International (Summer
Institute of
Linguistics) offers a free piece of software for doing so named
Ukelele.
Keyboard drivers for
Kannada,
as well as an improved version of the Kedage font (the only one
that
functions well under all circumstances with OSX), can be found
here.
Fonts
A
standard installation of Mac OSX contains a few such fonts: Times,
Palatino, and Helvetica. Other Unicode-enabled fonts, like Lucida
Grande and Monaco, lack certain styles.
Elegant professional
fonts that contain the necessary diacritical marks, available in
versions optimized for OSX and for Windows, are offered by SIL
International, such as
Gentium
Basic, which also comes in a slightly heavier version called
Gentium Book Basic. The older, original
Gentium
(still available) did
not offer bold face. A newer and very nice font is
Charis
SIL.
The
Unicode fonts offered by Dr. John Smith of Cambridge at his
FTP
site:
New Century Schoolbook, Palatino, Times, Courier and
Helvetica, are a reworking in OTF (OpenType) form of his
older
TTF (TrueType) fonts, that were based on original fonts made by
URW++
Design and Development Incorporated in Hamburg, Germany. However,
some users may find that they are not so satisfactory on older
systems (e.g., I had some problems on my PowerMac G5 when I still
used the old OSX 10.3.9 system) as the earlier TrueType fonts: no
underdotted, overdotted and underscored letters are produced.
Since
the old fonts are no longer available on Dr. Smith's FTP site, I
am
making them available here:
New
Century Schoolbook, Palatino,
Times, Courier
and
Helvetica. With
the
first three of these five fonts, printing bold and italic text is
also possible.
Much information about available Unicode fonts (also for Indian
scripts), and about how to install them, is given by Alan Woods on
his
"Unicode
fonts
for Macintosh OS X computers" page.
A test page in RTF format with a speciment text in transliteration
in
the above-mentioned fonts can be downloaded
here, and the PDF version
of the
same
here.
As has been mentioned above, there are special technical problems
concerning the use of fonts for Indian scripts. Besides the Indian
scripts that are supplied with OSX (for Nagari, Tamil, Gujarati
and
Gurmukhi), I know of one font that is quite good for Kannada,
namely
Kedage.
Application
software
that supports Unicode
Not all OSX applications support Unicode equally
well,
some of them
poorly, and some not at all.
Word
processors
I have difficulties using Microsoft® Word 2004 version
11.0:
the
program does not recognize some fonts, and at times texts that
were
written using other word processors, in which all required
diacritical
marks appeared correct, are rendered with odd distortions and
'empty
boxes'. Far more satisfactory is the freeware
NeoOffice,
which is not just good and can open all the usual M$ Office
formats,
but
is also available free of cost, based on the open source
OpenOffice,
of which there is a
version for OSX that runs under the X Windows interface and lacks
some
of the user comfort that NeoOffice has. (As per July 2006, a
native
version of OpenOffice is in the making.) The very reasonably
priced
Nisus
Writer
Express (and its enlarged version,
Nisus Writer Pro) at
present seems to
give the best allround Unicode support.
Also
Mellel
was developed with the handling of non-European scripts in mind,
but at
present it does not yet support fonts for Indian languages.
If one also wishes to use Indian scripts in one's texts,
NeoOffice is good for Kannada
but
has (as per version 1.2.2) an odd problem with the Devanagari
font:
when an anusvara is placed, some of the secondary vowel signs
above
consonants (
e and
ai) are moved leftward. -
Nisus Writer (Pro or Express)
seems
to
performs best.
As a robust and highly adaptable alternative to these word
processors,
the
TeX typesetting
system
must be mentioned here (and especially the extension for OSX [and
for
Linux; there is also an experimental version for Windows™] called
XeTeX,
which makes it possible to
use
any
installed OSX font in TeX). TeX is no longer a thing for
computer hobbyists, technicians, nerds and geeks, but has actually
become
easy to use,
thanks to
the various
editors and graphical frontends
that are in existence now. Entirely free of cost, one can have an
excellent, highly stable, powerful text processing system that
delivers
beautiful printed results and is platform independent (unless one
uses
platform-specific features). For examples of results in print, one
can
see the publications of the Institute of Indology and Tamil
Studies in
the University of Cologne, and the writings of Dr. Dominik
Wujastyk,
the Indologist who has contributed some items of interest to the
ever-expanding TeX system. One would wish that more scholars and
publishers use the versatile TeX system.
E-mail and
Unicode
E-mail clients for OSX that support Unicode include
Apple Mail (which
is included with OSX), the mail agent of the freely available,
beautiful, innovative multi-platform
Opera web browser, and
the
superb free, multi-platform
Thunderbird.
However, Thunderbird has
difficulties
correctly rendering
Indian scripts. (I have
tested
Kannada - the classical-looking
Kedage font by Mr Nicholas
Shanks,
based on a font
from Bangalore, which is
the only one to date that functions well under OSX - and Apple's
Devanagari font.) Not entirely surprisingly, among these e-mail
programs
Apple Mail and
Opera (since version 9.50,
which has
brought a dramatic improvement) perform
best with these
Indian scripts. (As a workabout solution, messages that are
received in
Kannada or Nagari with Thunderbird and that look ugly, can be
copied by means of cut-and-paste into Apple's little editor
TextEdit,
included with OSX, where they appear correctly.)
Web browsers
Support for Indian scripts has significantly improved with
the
standard
Apple browser
Safari
under OSX
10.4 (Tiger) in comparison with 10.3 (Panther). Taking the
Wikipedia in
Kannada, Tamil, Sanskrit and Hindi as a test case, all the pages
are
excellently readable. As of version 9.50, also
Opera renders them well (also
under
OSX 10.3.9). Other browsers, like Firefox, work fine
with Latin script with diacritical marks in Unicode, but there
still
are some difficulties rendering Indian scripts.
XeTeX
Jonathan Kew at SIL has produced a version of
TeX / LaTeX that,
astonishingly,
directly uses any regular font installed on a Mac OSX computer
(version
10.3 and higher), called
XeTeX.
This
too is freely downloadable and usable, and it is included in some
distributions of the TeX system for Mac (such as the excellent
MacTeX, free software
which can
be found on
CTAN (the
Comprehensive
TeX Archive Network) and its mirror sites, as well as on the
TeXLive
distribution on CD, which can be ordered from various TeX
distributors
and also includes the software for Windows systems). - XeTeX
supports
Unicode, and
using a freely available (La)TeX editor such as TeXshop or iTeXMac
(included in MacTeX), one
can input text with diacritical marks straight into a TeX source
file,
from which a PDF file is produced, that can be printed and viewed
on
all major hardware platforms: Mac, Linux, Windows, and more.
Recently a version of XeTeX
has been brought out for the
Linux
operating system too, and there is also a port for
Windows (link to a Japanese
site via
the SIL XeTeX page). I have not yet tested the Linux version; the
original for Mac is delightfully simple to use, and also supports
the
use of the fonts for Cyrillic and Devanagari and other
non-European
scripts that come with OSX. - Furthermore, XeTeX makes it possible
for
OSX users to use a much
larger
variety of fonts for Indian scripts, because it has its
own font
rendering engine that renders TrueType and OpenType fonts
correctly.
The MacTeX TeX distribution comes with a great deal of
documentation,
in different
languages. It can be found
here,
and
further documentation can be found
here. Another
excellent
distribution for Mac, which is more easily customizable for those
who
have
specific demands and do not need everything that comes with
MacTeX, is
gwTeX, which
is easily installed by
means of the
i-Installer.
A
very informative web page about using TeX on OSX is
this one, by Gerben
Wierda, the
maker of i-Installer.
TeX editors /
frontends and macro packages (LaTeX, ConTeXt)
TeX and LaTeX (i.e., TeX with the
standard
macro package by L. Lamport, which makes numerous tasks in the TeX
typesetting system easier and has for many become the usual way to
use
TeX) are used most easily and efficiently on the Mac by means of a
graphical frontend: an editor that includes further macro
functions.
Some of these editors are downloadable from the internet and may
be
used free of cost. My personal favourite is
TeXShop, available
here
and elsewhere. (TeXShop can also be used extremely easily with
ConTeXt, the modern
preprocessor-and-macro package that is increasingly seen as an
interesting alternative to LaTeX, and ConTeXt and XeTeX can also
be
combined easily.) Another good editor is
iTeXMac, available
here and elsewhere.
(iTeXMac can also be used with XeTeX, and SIL offers an
installation
script
here.
This
is a bit more cumbersome than using TeXShop, but it works. And it
works easily with (Xe)ConTeXt as well.)
ConTeXt is very
consistently
structured, is easily learnt, and in my opinion allows the user to
alter the finer details of TeX typesetting more easily than LaTeX
does.
This may be largely a matter of personal requirements and taste,
but in
any case it is worth looking at. Just like XeTeX, ConTeXt is
included
in
MacTeX, and detailed
documentation can be found at the
ConTeXt
website. There is also a
wiki with
many
links to further relevant pages. A web page in German explains the
main
differences
between ConTeXt and LaTeX with numerous concrete
(
very simple) examples
(source
files and PDFs).
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