Cerno’s post encouraged me to go back to what I had written mid-last year on the lack of Sinhala language UNICODE support on Macs. At the time I was on Tiger, Safari 2 and Firefox 2. Here’s the same page as before on the new browsers:
Click for larger image – Safari 3 on left, FF 3 Beta 5 on right
Clearly, things haven’t improved with Safari 3, Firefox 3 Beta 5 and Leopard.
Yet nothing gets the rendering quite right on Leopard, though what I see is strangely much better than what’s rendered on Cerno’s Mac.
Anyway, I still have to Bootcamp it into Vista whenever I have to do any serious work with Sinhala.
Here’s a tip for Windows users – the rather unimaginatively EnSiTip English Sinhala popup dictionary extension for Firefox, which under Windows is really quite brilliant and I found on the LTRL blog.
WARNING: For folks who are so advanced with technology, I would have imagined that LTRL would have had the good sense to optimise images for the web. But no. The LTRL blog has gems like 2Mb+ JPG images which make the page a nightmare to load. Just don’t try it over SLT ADSL on a bad day…
In short, us Mac users are still out of luck. Which is such a pity, since in every other respect, Macs trump Windows hands down (my two year old Dual Core Macbook Pro gave a Windows Vista Experience rating higher than a Core2Duo Sony Vaio bought earlier this year).
An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance.
I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002.
I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents.
Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs.
Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts.
I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.
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5 thoughts on “Sinhala on OS X Leopard – Still out of luck”
I posted on cerno’s blog: I can help you if you can help me. I don’t know anything about Sinhala but can make the font for you if you tell me what’s right and what’s wrong.
Okay, I posted a preliminary version on my website. It renders many characters better but is still far from perfect.
i had the same issues with tiger
but it’s not the OS but the browser version
apple released a new update for safari few weeks ago
since then it’s been working fine
I have also been trying to get Sinhala unicode fonts to render accurately on OSX Snow Leopard. Rendering is similar to above with ispilli, allapilli, papilli, combu, etc out of place. I have kaputadotcome, kaputa unicode & wijeaya fonts installed.
ICT for Peacebuilding (#ICT4Peace) 
I posted on cerno’s blog: I can help you if you can help me. I don’t know anything about Sinhala but can make the font for you if you tell me what’s right and what’s wrong.
Okay, I posted a preliminary version on my website. It renders many characters better but is still far from perfect.
i had the same issues with tiger
but it’s not the OS but the browser version
apple released a new update for safari few weeks ago
since then it’s been working fine
I have also been trying to get Sinhala unicode fonts to render accurately on OSX Snow Leopard. Rendering is similar to above with ispilli, allapilli, papilli, combu, etc out of place. I have kaputadotcome, kaputa unicode & wijeaya fonts installed.