Monday, January 14, 2008

Typing Kharosthi

Kharosthi was used to write Sanskrit and Gandhari about 2000 years ago, and is the script of the oldest Buddhist manuscripts yet found. It plays a role in Eliot Pattison's mystery "Water Touching Stone," which I am currently reading. An example of the kind of wooden tablet mentioned in that book can be seen here.

Two fonts which include Kharosthi are Alphabetum Unicode and MPH 2B Damase. A rudimentary keyboard layout can be downloaded from my iDisk.

The available fonts and OS X are not yet capable of displaying Kharosthi properly.

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