Using Tibetan unicode script on web pages

How to do it

Which font to use?
Use any Unicode Tibetan font!
It doesn't matter which one ... as long as the font is Unicode, the page will display in whatever Tibetan unicode font the user has on their own computer.
Why "unicode" font?
Many Tibetan fonts, like Monlam, TCRC YoutsoWeb, MS Himalaya, and more, are "unicode". When we use one of these, our web page user can have any other one, and still read the Tibetan.
It is just like when using English: You can type your web page in Ariel, times roman, anything ... All computers have some english font, so users can read the English.
(We don't really need to know exactly what is "Unicode" ... just make sure that your fonts are "Unicode fonts", and that your editor writes files in Unicode format.)
How to tell the browser you are using Unicode font?
There should be a line in the <head> of all your web page files, like this:
```
    <meta charset="utf-8" /> 
```
This will tell the browser to use the unicode character set. Then it will be ready for Tibetan — or any language!
- Your web pages may already have a line like this:
```
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
```
  (Or something else in place of the "ISO-8859-1".)
  Change it to <meta charset="utf-8" />
CSS to make sure the web browser uses Tibetan fonts:
in your stylesheet for the Tibetan pages:
- Put this at the very beginning of the stylesheet:
  @CHARSET "UTF-8";
  This is an addition to the meta tag discussed above.
- Have a font-family directive something like this:
```
   font-family:  "Microsoft Himalaya", "TCRC Youtso Unicode",
               "Tibetan Machine Uni","Tib-US Unicode", 
               Kokonor, Arial;
```
  In other words, we give a "cascade" (descending choices)
  - First, the Tibetan font we would prefer for reading the page.
  - Then, the most common Tibetan unicode fonts.
  - Then, if the user doesn't have any of those, Microsoft Arial which is a full Unicode implementation, and also covers any Latin characters (like english) in the page.
  The browser will find whatever Unicode Tibetan font they do have installed, and use it.
Tibetan is too small!
This is because of the stacking. Since multiple stacked characters can be very tall in Tibetan, the font makers made the characters very small. So you want to add something in your css for Tibetan pages, giving a larger font size for Tibetan.

Give them the font

Not everyone will have the Tibetan font you prefer for your site. Or may not have any Tibetan font at all, especially at a cybercafe!

You can provide any open source font through your CSS file, like this:

Upload the font .ttf file to your website — say in a directory called /fonts/.
At the beginning of your stylesheet file, put something like this:
```
    @font-face {
    font-family: 'MSHimalaya';
    font-style: normal;
    font-weight: normal;
    src: local('MSHimalaya'), url('/fonts/himalaya.ttf') format('truetype');
 }
```
In this example, 'MSHimalaya' would be the name you use in your stylesheet for the file.
'/fonts/himalaya.ttf' would be the actual name of the font file that you uploaded.
Then, in your stylesheet:
- If your entire site is in Tibetan, you can do like:
```
    body {
      font-size: 150%;
 }
    
```
  (or whatever size looks nice and readable.)
- If only parts of the site is in Tibetan, you can do like:
```
    .bo {
      font-size: 150%;
 }
    
```
  And then add the class 'bo' to any paragraphs, spans, etc that are in Tibetan.

If you are using a CMS

If you are using a CMS such as Joomla or WordPress, you can do all the above, in the theme/template and its stylesheet. Plus one more thing:

When you create the database for the CMS, select the collation and also the connection, as utf8_general_ci
Then all your content will be saved in unicode format.

Some good Tibetan unicode fonts

Microsoft Himalaya
Monlam Bod-Yig version 3 (is all unicode).
Tibetan Machine Uni
TCRC Youtsoweb (NOT other TCRC Bod-Yig fonts - they are not Unicode).

Some good text editors

All editors are not the same!
These editors handle Unicode by default. And have many other good features for making web pages, email ... anything that is text. (You might be surprised how often you don't need MS Word!)

NotePad++ — on Windows
BlueFish++ — on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux
vi and gmacs— on Linux

Some examples of sites using Bod-yig with unicode fonts:

There are many more!

Know more

About tibetan fonts and the web:

All content not copyright by anyone else is copyright © 2003–2010 James Walker.
License for use is the GNU Free Documentation License. Find it:
here in the License directory
or at the Free Software Foundation, www.fsf.org