Help:Multilingual support (Ethiopic)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Ethiopic syllabary, also known as the Ge'ez alphabet, is used in East Africa for Amharic, Bilen, Oromo, Tigre, Tigrinya, and other languages. The syllabary evolved from the script for classical Ge'ez, which is now a liturgical language.

The Ge'ez alphabet is not a standard font installation on most computers and must be added by the user. In order to view Ethiopic fonts, you only need a unicode Ethiopic font in your computer's font folder. In Windows systems, this folder is normally C:\Windows\Fonts. On Macintosh computers, you need only drag and drop the font onto the closed System folder. (The system will automatically sort it into the correct subfolder.) Once the font is installed, you may need to restart your web browser in order to make it recognize the newly installed fonts.

[edit] Free Ethiopic fonts and keyboard downloads

Only a font is needed to view Ethiopic script. A keyboard driver is required only if you also wish to write text in the script.

  • washra (package of several fonts and a virtual keyboard)
    • home page with install instructions
    • fonts only. Unzip the .ttf file in C:\Windows\Fonts\ on windows without their directory.
  • GF Zemen

[edit] Commercial software

[edit] Known compatibility issues

  • RaghuHindi (raghindi.ttf) will cause bold and/or italic Ethiopic text to not show up. To fix the problem, just remove the font.
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