I just started an open-source project, “Gyutrul Drawa” for a Tibetan phone environment, seeding it with the code to render Tibetan properly on Android, at:
https://code.google.com/p/gyutruldrawa/
“Gyutrul Drawa” is Tibetan for the “Magical Net,” which is one of the core texts of the Nyingma tradition, translated into Tibetan in the 8th century from Indian sources. Since our own modern Magical Net has appeared in the last 20 or so years, it felt appropriate to bring the name forward and use it again.
It doesn’t do much yet, but at least it renders a Tibetan web page properly in Android once you’ve unlocked your phone and installed the Jomolhari font, following the instructions at Nathan Freitas’s blog. (Note that the Tibetan Machine Uni font he suggests installing will NOT work with this, you must use Jomolhari.)
Future plans are to write a Tibetan landing page, improve the browser, and add the following applications:
- Connections to the various IM systems that support Unicode
- E-mail client
- Tibetan-English dictionary
- PDF reader with Tibetan-language buttons (to support reading scanned texts such as those from TBRC)
It may be possible to perform a similar technique to render Tibetan properly on the iPhone (and iPod Touch and iPad, of course). I hope to test that out when I get a chance.
Feel free to contact me if you’d like to help out with this project.