Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Please can someone tell me if there is a working Tibetan font that I can use on OO Writer? Is there one specifically for OO that I should get or can I use one that already exists?

Thanks in advance!

Kikilux

Title Edited. A descriptive title for posts helps others who are searching for solutions and increases your chances of a reply. (TheGurkha, Moderator)

Just try what you got or can find. OOo has some trouble dealing with OpenType fonts - older versions can't handle them at all, from 3.x it can display them, but not always all of its features. If you work with a TrueType font it should be fine.

If your problem has been solved, please edit the first post in this thread and add [Solved] to the title bar.

A thread from a few years back:

http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=43855

Hi Robert,
Thank you for your information.
Referring to the 2006 thread, I just tried the same Tibetan word typing with OO 3.2.1 Writer, it still doesn't work.
However, I've installed all the Tibetan fonts I found on the web and configured the OO as described on this page: http://www.digitaltibetan.org/index.php ... tan_script

In the mean time, these typings seem to show correctly on Mac TextEdit.....
Do you have any idea about how to solve this problem?
Thank you for your kindly help,

Phuntsok

I don't know whether it will be a solution, but you could try NeoOffice, which is especially developed for Mac.

Monlam seems to be a font put forward for Mac:

http://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/ ... tive_Fonts

See also this NeoOffice/Mac bug:

http://bugzilla.neooffice.org/bug.php?o ... bugid=1493

Thank you so much Robert!
It did give me some ideas.
I just gave some more try:
Some fonts as Kalisa, Kokonor, Tahoma...etc work perfectly in Neooffice (but not in Openoffice).
Monlam doesn't work in Neo, nor in OO.

The Jomolhari font and DDC Uchen font both work fine for Tibetan script - both of these may be freely downloaded from:
http://www.dzongkha.gov.bt/IT/download/ ... aFonts.zip

There are also detailed instructions on using OpenOffice for Tibetan and Dzongkha at:
http://digitaltibetan.org/index.php/Con ... tan_script
and at: http://www.dzongkha.gov.bt/IT/OpenOffice.en.html

Does anyone know why the Monlam fonts don't render correctly when there is a stack with a superfixed consonant and a subjoined one, like a ya-tak? for example སྦྱ? They work fine in other applications (e.g. MS Word on Windows, or Gnumeric on GNU/Linux), but not in OpenOffice or LibreOffice on either platform.

My teacher really likes these fonts (despite my protestations that they're not fully Unicode compliant) and has a large collection of material he's created in them over the years, and though I'm trying to help him to use OpenOffice / LibreOffice, this is a bit of a deal-breaker for him.

Would be grateful for any insights, suggestions or hints. Is the fault in the fonts (though they work elsewhere) or in Open/LibreOffice (though it does these stacks fine with other fonts)? Can anyone shed even a few photons on this one?

thanks!

My guess is that it's the fonts, especially if they are not fully Unicode, as that's what OOo supports.

FWIW, here's what I see when I paste your sample text into OOo 3.3 on Linux. I don't know if it's correct or not but it looks the same as what I see in my browser. Also, I know that the complex text support is still getting fixes and updates, so it certainly could be a (version- or platform-specific?) bug in OOo.

Thanks for your reply, acknak. Yes, the screenshot you posted is correct, and that's what I get with other Tibetan fonts in OOo as well. It's also what I get using this particular suite of fonts (the Monlam fonts: http://tibetangeeks.com/downloads/bodyi ... odYig-v.3/) in MS Word, Gnumeric, even Gedit, but not in any of the programs from the OOo suite. Instead I get this I'm a bit puzzled by this.

Edit: on a whim I just installed jEdit, since it's Java-based, to see if that would work, and the stack renders correctly in this font there too. Stumped.