Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Typing Kurdish

Kurdish (كوردی) is the official language of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and ever-increasing amounts of Kurdish text are being produced in Arabic script. While OS X 10.4 does not include a Kurdish keyboard layout, there is one you an download on my iDisk. A large number of free kurdish fonts have recently been made available from KurdITGroup. Unfortunately these are for Windows, but you should be able to use them correctly on a Mac with the applications Mellel or OpenOffice. For other apps, the normal OS X default font, Geeza Pro, probably does not do totally correct Kurdish orthography, and it is better to use one of the SIL fonts, Lateef AAT or Scheherazade AAT.

12 comments:

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ali said...

Hello

how to i install the kurdish keyboard?

Tom Gewecke said...

Ali -- you put the .keylayout file in Home/Library/Keyboard Layouts, logout/login, and then go to system prefs/language & text/input sources and check its box, plus the box for Show Input Menu in Finder, then select it in the "flag" menu at the top right of the Finder.

ali said...

Tom - omg, thx very much, it works fine.. omg, i didnt believe it will ever work, but it does..

thanks very much..

is it possible to change the system language to kurdish and do you have a file for that?

last question is, whats difference between Kurdish-Azerty.keylayout and kurdish.keylayout and the Kurdish Extended bundle.zip?

best regards
Ali

Tom Gewecke said...

Ali -- Sorry, no way to change the system language. Also I no longer remember the differences between the layouts, but I suspect kurdish and kurdish extended are Qwerty or something else than Azerty.

Nika said...

Hi I have a .doc file in kurdish language for an katalog design. I work with Mac OS 10.4.11.
When I open the file the script changes into arabic fonts...
Where can I find kurdish font for mac? Please Help

Tom Gewecke said...

Nika -- Arabic script is normal for Kurdish. Did the authors tell you it would be in Latin instead?

In case you are using Word for Mac to open this file, you need to know that this app does not actually support Arabic script, so you need to use something else.

Anonymous said...

i have the mac in danish and is now directory called "Home/Library/Keyboard Layouts"

Tom Gewecke said...

In Danish it should be Hjem/Bibliotek/Keyboard Layouts.

Anonymous said...

No Tom, this doesnt work for me. (Mac OS X 10.6.8) If I'm sent Kurdish text from a PC user in Word doc, it changes to Arabic when I open it - and all the Kurdish accents disappear. It doesnt read correctly in Kurdish.
What to do? Reluctant to have dual Windows/Mac set-up.

Tom Gewecke said...

Anonymous -- What are you trying to read this text with? Word for Mac has never supported RTL scripts, you have to use something else, like TextEdit.

If you like, send me a copy of the text giving you problems (tom at bluesky dot org).