Why are Mac Unicode fonts in a different section? |
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Unfortunately both Mac OS-X 10.5 and 10.6 (which supports Tibetan) and Adobe's programs support a different set of OpenType features which are required to correctly render Tibetan glyphs. So far Chris Fynn'sJomolhari ID font is the only publicly-available font that supports all platforms. The other fonts listed above run only with Windows and Linux, and the Mac fonts below run only with Mac OS-X. See Platform Independent Tibetan Unicode Fonts for the internal encoding differences. |
Why switch to Unicode? |
There still exist quite a number of high-quality Tibetan fonts which do not support the Unicode standard. Since they rely on proprietary encoding, they often only work in a well-defined and closed environment. That makes it difficult to work with standard software: |
* For legacy fonts, standard word processors like OpenOffice or Microsoft word do not understand boundaries of Tibetan syllables and might break syllables in wrong places. |
* Desktop search engines cannot search Tibetan in legacy encodings. |
* It is very difficult to change fonts; special conversion software is needed. |
* Files might not be readable in the future because they use proprietary encoding. |