Tue, 06 Jun 2006
The Tibetan Web
I can be quite a nit picker sometimes and my neurosis was fed by a mistake I found on the Karmapa's link site. They had typed the Karmê in Karmê Chöling as Karme'. So I sent KTD an email with a brief note on html character entities and they fixed the problem. That got me thinking again about putting Sanskrit and Tibetan on the web. The transliteration of Sanskrit into the Latin alphabet requires a bunch of accented characters. All are available in the Unicode font, but some are rather obscure. This page has the fullest explanation of generating acceneted characters that I've found on the web.
The transliteration of Tibetan into the Latin alphabet poses no specual problems. But Tibetan script does have its problems. The following is the Tibetan script for sbyin.pa, which is the Tibetan word for generosity. It was generated by this neat javascript program. Unfortunately it will render poorly or not at all in all browsers I know about, because Tibetan is a "stacked" language. This means syllables grow vertically as well as horizontally.
སབྱིནཔ་
Let me close by recommending Tibetan on the Mac, a new weblog that discusses creating Tibetan texts on the Macintosh.
