The SambhotaDege Unicode font begins our release of Sambhota Unicode fonts. With Tibetan Unicode, people can enter text using different Tibetan fonts without needing to convert from different encoding formats. In the past before Unicode, different Tibetan font providers used their own Tibetan encoding formats. Thus switching from one Tibetan font to another would require running conversion software. Not only that, previous font files only supported 256 potential characters. Therefore multiple font files had to be used to support a full set of Tibetan-Sanskrit characters. Each Tibetan Unicode font file can support over 60000 characters allowing for extensive customized character stack support.

The SambhotaDege Unicode font has characters that look exactly like the characters in the Sambhota Ededris font. We have added many additional characters required by the Unicode standard. Also each character stack plus vowel combination is now a single glyph in the font. This leads to better uniformity when printing, publishing on the web or when copying text between different programs.

Please note that there are still issues when using Tibetan Unicode on the PC, Macintosh and Linux. For example, Tibetan Unicode fonts that work on the PC may not work on the Macintosh and vice-versa. Each Tibetan Unicode font essentially contains a table of instructions on how to render or draw each character stack. Currently the different operating systems on the PC and Macintosh offer different support for such instructions. Not only that, even though the operating systems on the PC and Macintosh support Unicode, this does not mean that individual software programs do. Thus you may find that your favorite word processor does not currently support Tibetan Unicode. Microsoft Word and Open Office do support Unicode however.

The SambhotaDege Unicode font currently works under Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows XP. Even though the font can be installed and used on the Macintosh, the character stacks do not appear correctly owing to a lack of specialized support in the Macintosh operating system. However, you can run Parallels or Bootcamp on the Mac to support Vista or XP and get SambhotaDege Unicode support in that manner