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Ethiopic
Ethiopic refers to Ge'ez or Classic Ge'ez, one of the
ancient languages of Ethiopia which is now mainly used in Ethiopian
Orthodox Church as liturgical language. Its
script has evolved through the centuries ingrained into the culture,
traditional education, and other social systems of Ethiopia. The
script, known as Ethiopic or Ethiopian script, is the official
writing system of Ethiopia.
Ethiopic Script is syllabic, that is each character
embodies "consonant+vowel" characteristics. It implements a syllabary
system structured on phonetically ordered blocks. There are more
than 316 syllabic characters in the alphabet, 8 punctuation marks,
and 20 digits.
Ethiopic writing system is left-to-right and top-to-bottom. Words
are separated with blank space/Ethiopic hulet-netib, sentences with
Ethiopic arat-netib, and paragraphs with recognized horizontal space.
Pages are numbered from left-to-right.
There have been a serious of standardization efforts by
various groups, committees, and associations. The Unicode Ethiopic
standard is by far a promising one.
Ethiopia Jiret is a Unicode True Type font. It consists of
Ethiopic and Latin-1 blocks. The Ethiopic block confirms to the
Unicode 3.0 standard.
The font requires refinement and better hinting and my plan is to work
on it while making it available. Time permits, I will include the font
in Metafont and bdf format in the near
future. Please read the following section for downloading and installation
instructions.
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The font file name is jiret.exe, compressed in self-extracting
format. Download and save it into a temporary folder.
Download
Ethiopia Jiret (self-extracting)
Or, you may also download the font in ZIP format jiret.zip, but
the instruction on installation is based on the self-extracting format.
Download
Ethiopia Jiret (zip compressed)
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Start Windows Explorer and open the folder where the font
file is saved.
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Double click the font file jiret.exe. It will self-extract
itself. Now, you may close Windows Explorer.
- Click on the Start button, then select Setting.
- Click on the Control Panel, then double click on Font icon.
- Select the File menu, then click Install New Fonts....
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From Add Fonts dialog box, specify the folder where the
Ethiopia Jiret font is saved. If it is found by the system, the
font name will be displayed on the top portion of the panel.
- Select the name and click on the Ok button.
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Now, close the Add Fonts dialog box, the Fonts and Control
Panel window.
Note: The reader may benefit a great deal by visiting
Alan Wood's Unicode
Resources page for a specific type of browser.
Supposedly, Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer are capable of
discerning a Unicode page if a web page identifies itself with the
language encoding. Configuring or making sure that the browser is
configured properly will be helpful.
Internet Explorer
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Turn Auto-Select On
If the Atuo-Select is turned on, Internet Explorer will try
to determine the language encoding used by the web page. Follow the
instruction below to do so.
- Select the View menu from Internet Explorer.
- Click on Encoding.
- If net checked, click on Auto-Select.
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Manually Setting Language Encoding
For some reason, if a web page isn't displayed with the proper encoding,
a single language encoding can be specified.
- Select the View menu from Internet Explorer.
- Choose Encoding and More.
- Select the one from the given list of encoding.
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Multiple Unicode Fonts
What if, you have more than one Unicode Ethiopic fonts? It is likely that
the browser may pick the font you may not wish to use. You can force Internet
Explorer to select your choice of font.
- Select the Tools menu.
- Choose Internet Options.
- Click on the General tab.
- Click the Fonts... button.
- From the Font dialog box, in the script box, select Ethiopic.
In the Web page font and Plain text font box, select the font
that you need. Finally, press Ok.
Netscape Navigator
- Specifying Unicode Font
- Select Edit menu.
- Click on Preferences....
- From the Category box, click Font. On the right
hand side panel:
Set the Font Encoding to Unicode
Set the Variable width font to Ethiopia Jiret
- You may also specify size here.
- Click Ok.
- Manually Setting Language Encoding
- Select the View menu from Netscape Navigator.
- Choose Character Set.
- Select the one from the given list of encoding.
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