Tibetan fonts

When we got Unicode based Tibetan computer fonts back in the beginning of this century, we finally had a solution where you didn't need to install custom fonts with specific character codes. You could copy and paste Tibetan between documents and platforms and select any specific Tibetan fonts of your liking. You could search across the document, learn one single way to enter Tibetan (typically Wylie or extended Wylie). Also web sites could show Tibetan text without the need to install specific fonts. Finally, we could do internet searches using Tibetan sentence -- as an experiment do a search with for example "ལས་ལས་འཇིག་་རྟེན་སྣ་ཚོགས་སྐྱེས"་and in addition to obvious pages you might find totally new content you didn't know existed on the web!

It is true that for academic papers Wylie is the main format used for Tibetan, even if I've seen more and more papers using Tibetan fonts for whole sections of original Tibetan texts translated or commented upon.

The best resource to learn about Tibetan fonts and input systems is the Digital Tibetan wiki. In addition to information about fonts and text input, it has lots of other knowledge related to computers and Tibetan language editing and tools.

The University of Virginia font information page is also a good resource -- it lists all the current fonts, free and commercial. The overall index page has more links to other font related topics.

As for default fonts on computers, the Apple products (Macintosh, iPhone, iPad) have by default Kailasa and  Kokonor fonts. Kailasa is activated for Tibetan user interfaces and Kokonor for Tibetan text. But I've used Kailasa for printing out Tibetan texts as the fonts are very clear and easy to read even in small sizes.

Microsoft products have the Himalaya font. Something that is common is the height and spacing for specific fonts. In the case of Himalaya the same font size selected looks bigger when using this font compared with the Apple Tibetan fonts (or others). The THDL font also has more height, especially between lines. Now, that could be changed in either text processors such as Microsoft Word so you could squeeze in the text lines by changing line spacing values. I've also seen issues with PDF or other file formats using Himalaya fonts on a Macintosh resulting in missing letters and so on. Unfortunate bugs could appear due to font issues. Personally I would use THDL if I wanted the Tibetan texts, let's say in PDF files, work properly across any platform.

THDL is a very common free font and maybe the most common font used outside the platform fonts, it looks good and easy to read. Everyone has their own ideas which is the best looking Tibetan font. I've been going back and forth, just now it's either Jomolhari or DDC Uchen. Some fonts look good on computer screens, other good on paper. 

We could embed fonts now inside web pages so we have many Tibetan text pages with specific fonts used. If you copy text from those pages, you end up using the default computer font if you don't have the specific font installed. Sometimes it's best to keep the actual font used, such as SakyaLibrary text material. Many of these sites have information what font was used. The reason is that in many cases the originators spent time making sure the font works with the texts. We could have issues with Tibetan letter stacking (seed syllables et rest), the font combinations could become very high in scope resulting in incomplete rendering (the computer rendering engine just fails to draw it properly). Or then the stack font is missing -- nowadays Tibetan combined stack-letters are pre-built to make the rendering fast, but some combinations could be missing, especially with let's say Kalachakra seed syllables that could have 4-6 letters stacked on top of each other (!).

A typical issue is mixing Tibetan and English on the same page or web page. There's a need to use different font sizes to help out reading each format. If you use the same font size, you will see the line spacing change when Tibetan is used. See here for an example:

One solution is to add spacing values across all the lines to compensate. This might work or look odd, depending on the publication. For web pages this University of Virginia page has technical information how to adjust this.

If you see round dots in Tibetan font texts, either web pages or your documents, this is the rendering engine could not stack properly the combined letters and instead just draws a round dot. This could also happen with web pages. This document talks how to avoid this with web content. Fo text documents the best approach I've seen is to either adjust the line spacing so that the text engine has enough space for doing stacking, or then exchange the font with one that might do a better job.

Different browsers could also draw Tibetan fonts differently, or have issues, check here for a solution to handle Firefox browsers.

If you use plain text files for Tibetan font material, the search and rendering is fast, but you lose context such as smaller and larger Tibetan fonts based on let's say instruction material. This is why many Tibetan digital text collections rather use RTF files so the font size is preserved. Or, if you still want to use text files, use tags such as <small> .... </small> to indicate smaller text. This way this original content information is not lost.

Hope this was useful, there's more to fonts and also as we get better computer systems and bugs fixed the font handling will improve. I'm especially grateful that large computer companies provide Tibetan fonts as the market for these is not big.