Learning to Type in Tibetan | Installing Monlam Font on Mac OS X

Learning to type Tibetan using all of its hundreds of chraracters via keyboard is easier than it first seems.

I’m going to assume that you already know the Tibetan alphabet and understand the rules for joining letters. This article will focus only on the topic of learning to type Tibetan with keyboard.

If you want to Learn Tibetan instead, you can start doing it from home using >> these << instructions.

The first point regarding typing Tibetan is that how well you’re going to learn, and if you are ever going to really learn and feel confident about your skill, it is essential to choose the right keyboard layout. When it comes to Tibetan script, there is one keyboard layout to rule them all. It’s called Monlam and it will look like this once you have successfully installed it on your Mac:

This is how your input menu should look like, which is available on the upper right hand corner after you add the font

Not just that the keyboard layout is magnificently thought, but also the font itself is beautiful and reads very nicely in any size. As a point of reference for motivation, with very little practice I’m able to write Tibetan text without looking at the keyboard and using effectively all of my fingers. I’m nowhere near fluent or even capable in Tibetan language, but I can copy text to digital format pretty fluently.

As the first step, you will need to download the file containing two things:

• the actual font files
• the keyboard layout file

You can download the zip file >> here <<

IMPORTANT SECURITY NOTICE: You should have an anti-virus solution [1] installed in your mac before taking handling the package. Because of the wide popularity Monlam font has within the Tibetan diaspora, it is a highly likely target for Chinese hacker groups with the interest of spying on communications of Tibetan diaspora. Similar activity has been covered by CitizenLab recently [2]. Do not attempt to download the package from any other source than the ones mentioned in this article. The package provided here is not guaranteed to be clean, but it is the one that I use myself and also it does not contain more than the absolutely necessary files.

SETTING UP MONLAM FONT ON MAC OS X

Once you have downloaded and extracted the zip file from the above link, or the Momlan website (http://www.monlamit.org), first select all the font files in the Fonts sub-folder and open them.

For each font that you opened, a window will open for you to confirm the installation. Go through this process of “installing” the font for each of the font files in the folder.

Once you have completed adding the fonts, you have to know add the keyboard layout, or otherwise you will be forced to use one of the preset Tibetan keyboard layouts in Mac OS X and I can assure you, you do not want that. Even native Tibetan scholars struggle typing with some of the “standard” keyboard layouts.

1. Open Finder
2. Go to ‘Go’ menu
3. Choose Go to Folder…
4. /Library/Keyboard Layouts

Then copy paste the contents of the ‘keyboard layouts’ folder in the uncompressed zip file so that it will look like this:

Now we’re almost done. The last thing we have to do is to activate the keyboard layout from System Preferences.

1. Open Keyboard inside System Preferences
2. Go to Input Sources
3. Add new by clicking the + button below the list of active input methods
4. Search for ‘monlam’ and choose Monlam Bod-yig v3.00

Once you have done it successfully, it should look like this:

Now you should also see the Monlam option in your input method menu:

If you have to switch between roman and bodhi script frequently, it is very useful to create a keyboard short cut switching between keyboards. In my case I use command+shift+f. This you can do from:

System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts where in effect you can record a shortcut to your liking. Make sure to choose something complicated enough, so that it will not be used by other programs. If you choose something that a program uses already, then you might not be able to use the shortcut to switch between keyboard input methods when you’re in that program.

The next article in this series will cover some of the most frequent beginner Monlam font user questions.

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REFERENCES

[1] http://www.avira.com/en/avira-free-antivirus

[1] https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-antivirus-for-mac-home-edition.aspx

[2] https://citizenlab.org/2015/06/targeted-attacks-against-tibetan-and-hong-kong-groups-exploiting-cve-2014-4114/