Tibetan Portal

Here is a flash video of a Tibetan Music Video by Tsering called “Missing Home.” Apart from being a great song, I thought the font choice for subtitles was worthy of discussion. I like the way the subtitles fade in and out of the picture. However the choice of font style is probably too ornate for subtitle use. IMHO, a more “sans-serif” Tibetan font would have been more appropriate for television broadcast.
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Take the OpenOffice suite (word processor, spreadsheat, etc) anywhere you go! This is great if you want to use OpenOffice at an Internet Cafe, a school computer, or anywhere you can’t or don’t want to install the program. I’ve found that this is great to have during fieldwork. Grab the latest version (now 2.2) at www.portableapps.com. Navigate to Applications > Office.

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Firefox in Ubuntu Feisty Linux doesn't render Tibetan Unicode correctly out of the box. This screencast shows how to solve the problem in Feisty by installing an additional language localization (such as Bengali), which automatically throws Firefox into a better rendering mode (that is, it will use the Pango text layout engine). The Flash screencast is 8 minutes long. The first part shows the problem with solution, and the second half looks at the start-up script Firefox uses to guess if you need complex script rendering.

With the following instructions, you yourself should be able to convert many of the older Tibetan documents stored in your computer into the the newer Tibetan Unicode standard. If you have legacy Tibetan documents (containing TCRC Youtso, Sambhota, LTibetan, Tibetan Machine Web, etc) to convert into Tibetan Unicode, then you will first want to make sure that you are using the new Windows Vista operating system. You will also need to install those legacy fonts into your Vista computer.

The screencast here gives a quick introduction to using Tibetan Unicode in Word 2007 and typing in Extended Wylie using Keyman version 7.