Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Reading Non-Unicode Kurdish

I recently got a query from a user indicating that Kurdish in Windows docs was appearing on their Mac with various Arabic language letters where Kurdish characters should be.

I could not figure out how that would happen, until I stumbled across a wikipedia article telling how special "Ali" fonts had been devised to let Windows users who only had an Arabic keyboard layout could still create text that looked Kurdish. Luckily the same article provided the address of an online site which can translate the non-standard "Ali" encoding into real Kurdish Unicode.

The same site can be used to convert a number of other non-Unicode Kurdish font systems.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you! I had been looking for a solution to the same problem for ages (Kurdish letters appearing as Arabic on a website). This really did the job :)