Thaana is unusual in the South Asia region because it is written right to left and includes characters from both the Arabic script and South Asian scripts. Like the other alphabets in the region, the script consists of consonantal letters with vowel diacritics.
Although Unicode includes Thaana, support from major software vendors is just now catching up. Therefore many Thaana sites may offer custom fonts or be written in the Latin alphabet.
If you have your browser configured correctly, the Web sites above should display the correct characters. If you have difficulties, see list below for font and browser configuration instructions.
Additional freeware fonts can be downloaded from from the sites below. These should work on Windows XP and Mac OS X
See also
Browsers which fully support Unicode are the strongly recommended. Click link in list to view configuration instructions. You will be asked to match a script with a font.
Note on OS X: Only Opera displays most vowel signs correctly on the Mac. Vowel signs are visible in Firefox/Mozilla or Safari, but are displaced off the letter. Users of these browsers can cut and paste text into TextEdit is content is not clear
Note on System 9: Because Unicode support is incomplete in System 9, it may be beneficial to upgrade to OS X if you need to work with Unicode.
If you see Roman character gibberish instead of a South Asian script, you will need to manually switch from Western encoding view to the Unicode encoding under the View menu of your browser.
In order to integrate foreign scripts into your computer, you must set up "keyboard" utilities in your operating system. Keyboards will allow you to switch between typing English and other languages in word processors and Web tools. This process will also make sure the correct fonts are installed are availble for Windows or Macintosh.
Microsoft provides both a Dhivehi phonetic and Divhei Typewriter keyboard, but you may have to install them from the Windows System disk because it is a complex script. See the Windows complex script Keyboard instructions for details.
See instructions for configuring right to left typing in Word for Windows for tips on how to type RTL languages.
As of version 10.4, Apple does not provide a Thaana keyboard, but there is a freeware Thaana OS X keyboard utility available, which works in Unicode aware applications like Microsoft Office 2004 or Text Edit.
See tips for creating Mac Right-to-Left documents (including alternatives to Microsoft Office) for more information.
See the Unicode chart for Thaana to see OS X Hex codes and HTML entity codes. Note that the correct Unicode font must be installed in order for the codes to work. See the Browsers Section for details.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are meta data tags which indicate the page of a language, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
One option is to use FrontPage, Netscape/Mozilla Composer or Dreamweaver and change the keyboard to the correct script. Make sure you specify the encoding in the Web page header.
Another option is to compose the basic text in an international or foreign languags text editor or word processor and export the content as an HTML or text file with the appropriate encoding. This file could be opened in another HTML editor such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver an edited for formatting.
Unless a keyboard which supports Unicode is installed, you must use the Unicode chart for Thaana and enter HTML entity codes.
One option is to use FrontPage, Netscape/Mozilla Composer or Dreamweaver and change the keyboard to the correct script. Make sure you specify the encoding in the Web page header.
Another option is to compose the basic text in an international or foreign languags text editor or word processor and export the content as an HTML or text file with the appropriate encoding. This file could be opened in another HTML editor such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver an edited for formatting.
Some HTML editors set the direction of the text automatically. but it can also be set manually by using the newer <dir> and <bdo> attributes. See the Right-to-Left Alignment Tips page for more details.
In some cases, your best options may be to use PDF files or image files. See the Web Development Tips section for more details.
