Gandhari Unicode FAQ

Questions people have asked about the GU font can be found here. For unicode problems, please also check Alan Wood's Unicode Resources page.

• Q: I have installed the fonts on OS X 10.3.7. The font appears in the font list of my word processors but for some reason the diacritics are not typable. In other words, I just get the characters that I would get without any special keyboard (å for long a, etc) or font.

  A: The reason for this is that the Mac keyboard has specific assignments for certain characters in the extended set. Fonts such as Normyn and Times Gandhari re-assigned these code points to other letters so that one could use the Mac assigned key strokes to produce ā (a with macron) etc. Unicode does not work this way, as the idea is to have fixed unique code points for every character. So ā is assigned an entirely different number in the font. This means that you can have å and ā in the same document without fear of confusing the two.

  The solution to this problem is to use a keyboard program which maps keystrokes to unicode values. Such programs can be customized for whatever unicode characters you use, whether they are for Sanskrit transliteration, Greek, or Devanagari. For the Macintosh I recommend using Toshiya Unebe's EasyUnicode keyboard.

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