QUERY> Siddham Font and Text Input

Andrey,

There are ways around it, but from my experience as a fellow Mac user, they are not particularly fun. Mostly because—at least to my understanding—there is currently no way to simply "type Siddham."

To be perfectly clear, if one wanted to type in Japanese or Chinese (or even Sanskrit), one could just install the proper IME, begin typing, and eventually convert one's text to the proper language. This ability to type text (even in Sanskrit) and then convert to Siddham is the technology that does not yet seem to exist.

One can get around this by using a font, which can achieve what you're looking to do, albeit with some difficulty. There are a few fonts floating around that I am aware of, each with their own issues:

(1) One of them is bundled with the Japanese font project called Konjaku Mojikyō. I haven't looked into this project in some time, but my understanding was that the fonts were freely distributable, but the software to search for the necessary character was available only via purchase. At the time I looked into it (admittedly several years ago), it was also PC-only. All of the fonts seem to still be available for download via http://www.mojikyo.org/. I don't recall off-hand which fonts contain Siddham characters, but I want to say that there were two individual font files, both located in the M118-122 range.

(2) Another font was used for the CBETA project (siddham.ttf), but seemed to have some difficulty working with a Mac interface for some reason. More than a decade ago, Iyanaga Nobumi was able to get a friend to fix the font so that it would work on a Mac. I'm pretty sure I have this "fixed" version archived somewhere if necessary. I also seem to recall this font being distributed with an MS Excel spreadsheet that listed the characters from the font beside their romanized equivalents to facilitate searching. I should have the requisite Excel file available too.

(3) I happened to have found a third font called "Muktamsiddham" just via a Google search, but haven't had much chance to experiment with it. There might be even more of them out there, but these are the main three Siddham fonts I'm aware of.

If you are running OSX Yosemite or later, once you have any of these fonts installed on your Mac, you're supposed to be able to go to the OSX Font Book (under "Applications") and load the font there. If you go to View --> Repertoire, it should ideally show you all of the characters available in your Siddham font. You can then hopefully select the character of your choice, copy it, and insert it into your preferred text.

As somewhat of a disclaimer, I haven't needed to insert Siddham text since I upgraded to Yosemite last year. Previous versions of OSX allowed you to access fonts directly via the Character Viewer and insert whichever characters you wanted from there. Even though that process is unavailable in newer versions of OSX, that is the process with which I am most familiar.

Depending on the Siddham font that you choose and your familiarity with the script itself, searching for the proper character can be difficult and time-consuming. If I recall correctly, Muktamsiddham is the only font to display its characters in some kind of logical progression or order, facilitating the selection of an individual character. If memory serves, both the CBETA font and the Mojikyo font place characters at random throughout the font, so there isn't much of a workaround unless you have Mojikyo's PC-only Japanese-only searching software, or the Excel file distributed with the CBETA font.

At present, however, I am aware of no other way for Mac users to input Siddham. If anyone else has a better method than the ones I've detailed here, I would also love to hear about them.

Best,

Joseph P. Elacqua
Ph.D candidate, Leiden University