Nitartha international´s long-range development program is to produce software designed to work with multibyte fonts. We are working to prepare for the finalizing and widespread adoption of the emerging Unicode standard for international typography.

Using newly implemented technologies, the Nitartha Tibetan input system will provide a Unicode compliant font of Tibetan characters, Latin character keyboard input, and natural sorting and indexing capability based on Unicode encoding standards. We also believe such a system will facilitate ease of use. The Nitartha Unicode software development project is led by Chris Fynn, a developer with both programming knowledge and extensive Tibetan-language ability, who also participated in the development of the Unicode standard for Tibetan.

This development is based on Tibetan language encoding standards accepted by the international community. These standards are most widely known by the Unicode appellation, but a number of standards body are cooperating in this effort. (See Chris´s discussion of displaying diacritics on the web for an example of the interrelationship of Unicode and the ISO standards.)

Specifically, the Unicode Consortium has adopted the Unicode standard which includes a block of characters for Tibetan, summarized below. The Unicode Consortium´s own code chart reference for the Tibetan script block adopted in Unicode 2.1 may be viewed without glyphs and with glyphs. After many years of delay, commercial operating systems such as the next iteration of Windows will finally truly support Unicode, and Nitartha will lead in the provision of a Unicode enabled Tibetan-language word-processing system.

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