The Digital Library Management System (DLMS) incorporates the display of Tibetan as an alternative to the display of Wylie transliteration for titles, names, descriptions, colophons and so on.

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TWO APPROACHES FOR TIBETAN DISPLAY

There are a number of issues surrounding the display of Tibetan in current web browsers on Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh. In response to the variations in how browsers render the fonts, we developed two approaches.

The first approach uses the Tibetan Machine Web (TMW) font that has been developed by Tony Duff with support of the Trace Foundation and the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library. This is currently the default font for web display on the new TBRC web site (download TMW).

There are some issues that the user should be aware of with respect to text displayed with TMW. On the Windows platform (Windows 2000 and XP) the Internet Explorer erroneously introduces a space after each explicit vowel mark. Apparently the Internet Explorer treats each vowel mark as spacing even though it correctly displays over/under the preceding stack in the appropriate manner. Thus the resulting display is badly spaced. On all platforms Mozilla and Firefox both fail to display 'i' and 'o' in some situations such as "gyi", "kyi" and "blo"; however, "gyis" for example is correctly displayed. Opera displays correctly on Windows and Macintosh. On the Macintosh platform Safari and Omniweb also display correctly.

The second approach uses Unicode to display Tibetan. Correct display of Unicode Tibetan requires that there be a sophisticated unicode rendering engine on the platform; there must a Unicode Tibetan font that contains appropriate "hinting" for the unicode rendering engine so that it will properly draw stacks and so forth; and finally the web browser has to make proper use of the unicode rendering engine. If any one of these three conditions is not met then the results will be less than acceptable.

The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library has developed the Tibetan Machine Uni font that is properly hinted for versions of the Microsoft/Uniscribe unicode rendering engine (versions of at least 1.453 of the usp10.dll present in the SP1 of Office 2003). These conditions satisfy two of the three. The only browser that we found that currently makes proper use of the Uniscribe engine is the Internet Explorer. Mozilla/Firefox and Opera all fail to take advantage of the hinting and the resulting display is rather poor.

On the Macintosh the XenoType Tibetan New font is properly hinted for Apple's Advanced Type system for unicode rendering. The THDL Tibetan Machine Uni hinting isn't compatible with Apple system; however, the XenoType font displays quite nicely in Safari on Macintosh OS X. All other browsers on the Macintosh platform do not make appropriate use of the Apple unicode system and so have unsatisfactory display of Tibetan unicode even when using the XenoType font.

DLMS WYLIE-TO-TIBETAN CONVERTER

We have made use of the Jskad software developed at THDL primarily by David Chandler to perform the conversion of the THDL Extended Wylie Transliteration System into Tibetan Machine Web and Unicode. The code has been modified to accomodate some uses of puctuation and so on that are specific to the TBRC Knowedge Base. These functions have been packaged in a built-in function module for the eXist XML database system that is used as the basis for the new TBRC web site.