Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Typing Tajik

Tajik is a variety of Farsi/Persian spoken primarily in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, but also Iran and Afghanistan. In the former two countries, it uses the Cyrillic alphabet with 6 characters beyond those found in Russian. OS X includes the fonts necessary for this language.

You can get experimental Cyrillic Tajik keyboard layouts here. The QWERTY version has a graphic to show the character location. The PC version has the special Tajik characters on the Alt/Option layer of the normal Russian keys. Leave a comment if you find errors or think improvements are desirable.

11 comments:

Luca said...

I can't even open the page. what should I do?

Tom Gewecke said...

Luca -- I certainly have no problem. Are you trying to use PC? You need to use a Mac I think. Email me and I can send it to you (tom at bluesky dot org).

Ben said...

Tom,

Is this still available? I can't seem to open it either.

Tom Gewecke said...

Ben -- try this one

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/46870715/k/tajik.zip

Galib said...

Hi Tom,
I got zip file but don't know how to install it. new to mac,, and will it show up in lang. & text preferences?
Thanx

Tom Gewecke said...

Galib -- you unzip by double-clicking if necessary, then put the .keylayout file in Home/Library/Keyboard Layouts, the logout/login. It should then appear in the input sources preferences. To get to Home/Library in 10.7 or later, hold down the alt/option key while you do Finder > Go.

Galib said...

Great! it works. thank you again.
btw, some russian letters have been excluded from tajik alphabet (щ,ы,ь,ц)

Anonymous said...

Hello Tom,

I also have a mac, I have done what you have described above (dropbox) and yet the keyboard becomes russian and not tajik. What do you suggest?

Thanks for your help,

Tom Gewecke said...

email me (tom at bluesky dot org) and tell me exactly what you did to install the .keylayout file in your machine and then select it in the "flag" menu.

Tom Gewecke said...

Sai--check the App Store for yourself, that's the only way to add anything to an iOS device.

phoo said...

Unicode Pad for iOS allows you to create custom keyboards using any unicode characters.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/unicode-pad/id374098312?mt=8

I use it for Tajik and several other character sets. Unfortunately, you still have to copy/paste any text you type into your target app (i.e. Email, etc.), but it's better than not have Tajik on my iPhone at all.