Kuensel Newspaper - Dzongkha font goes global

10 September, 2007 - Using dzongkha on computers will no longer be restricted to Bhutanese within the country alone. Bhutanese anywhere in the world, who are comfortable with the national language, can now view or type texts, view web pages and send and read e-mails.

Having worked on creating the world’s first unicode fonts for Dzongkha since 2000, a joint project between the Dzongkha Development Commission, the Orient Foundation in UK, and Microsoft, has recently come up with a new computer system, Microsoft Windows Vista, which fully supports Dzongkha.

Unlike present software like Windows 2000 and XP, which have to have a unicode programme installed separately in their computers, the new system, which uses Word 2007, has a built-in Dzongkha font in the computer.

It supports power point presentation in Dzongkha, naming and sorting files and folders automatically in correct Dzongkha alphabetical order and supports Dzongkha names, time and dates, calendar, currency and numerals.

Other systems like the Dzongkha Linux, which is only operational within the country, failed to function fully and did not support power point and Word Excel.

“While Dzongkha Linux is applicable to people, who only read and write Dzongkha, Windows Vista can be used by people, who are not so thorough with Dzongkha, to type, read and send e-mails,” said Ugyen Wangdi, an IT personnel working with one of the media firms in the capital.

He added that Dzongkha usage in computers, which was, so far, only at application level, reached its operational system with the coming of Windows Vista. “It has gone global,” he said.

Mr. Robert R Chilton, who holds a master’s degree in Indo-Tibetan religion and literature, and a Microsoft computer engineer by profession, was in Thimphu to train Bhutanese IT personnel on the new system.

According to him, Bhutan’s contribution to this system was the unicode font development, based on which many Dzongkha fonts were modified and already in use in computer systems like Linux.

The only drawback with Windows Vista, he said, was the absence of grammar and spell-check mechanism. “Having come a long way in creating this software, working on grammar and spell-check should not pose much of a problem,” said Mr. Chilton.