Tibetan font after Big Sur update

This has always been hit and miss for me--well before BigbSur.

Times and Cambria, along with just about all fonts that come with MacOS, have no Tibetan in them and cannot display it at all. When you input Tibetan characters, an app is supposed to automatically use KaiLasa or Kokonor to display your text. This will be the case even if the font window of the app does not change and still says Times or Helvetica or some other Latin font.

This will be the key thing.

With some things the automated switch between fonts when the text is in Tibetan doesn't work.

If you look at the element-information of Wikipedia in Tibetan, they use a different font which is not replaced or replaced incorrectly.

In Safari I temporarily fixed this issue by overwriting the standard font on all website to "-apple-system".

This is rather radically for it changes all fonts on all websites to the standard system font.

No serifs etc. anymore. But I don't mind.

This can be done with an extension for websites individually, but I just put a custom stylesheet in the advanced settings of Safari with the content:

fontchange.css

* {
	font-family: -apple-system !important;
}

For the dictionary, the problem is similar.

The only solution I see for now is to change the font in the css file of the respective dictionaries or just delete these css files (when it falls back to "default.css".

Go to "/Library/Dictionaries/Monlam TB dictionary.dictionary/Contents" and look at "DefaultStyle.css".

either delete that file (which will make you loose the over formatting) or just change the font in this file.

My DefaultStyle.css:

@charset "UTF-8";
@namespace d url(http://www.apple.com/DTDs/DictionaryService-1.0.rng);

d|entry {
font-size: 100%;
	font-family: -apple-system;
	color: #300000;
}

h1	{
	font-size: 150%;
	font-family: -apple-system;
	font-weight: normal;
	color: #600000;
}

h3	{
	font-size: 105%;
	font-family: -apple-system;
}
p	{
	font-size: 105%;
	font-family: -apple-system;
	line-height: 28px;
	
}

b	{
	font-size: 90%;
	font-family: -apple-system
	color: #0066CC;
	margin-left: 30px;
	margin-right: 3px;
	font-style: italic;
	font-weight: normal;
}
b1	{
	font-size: 90%;
	font-family: -apple-system;
	color: #009955;
	border: 1px solid;
	border-color: #F4F4F4;
	padding-top: 2px;
	padding-bottom: 2px;
	padding-left: 5px;
	padding-right: 5px;
	border-radius: 6px;
}

span.column {
	display: block;
	border: solid 2px #c0c0c0;
	margin-left: 2em;
	margin-right: 2em;
	margin-top: 0.5em;
	margin-bottom: 0.5em;
	padding: 0.5em;
	font-family: -apple-system;
}

d  {
font-size: 100%;
	font-family: -apple-system;
	}
	entry {
font-size: 100%;
	font-family: -apple-system;
	}

This needs to be done for each dictionary that has these problems.

There should be a similar workaround for the Facebook app, but I don't have this myself so I can't help there.

Normally the css can be modified by looking in the package content (right click).

And as mentioned by Tom, when you try to use a font that doesn't support Tibetan in a word processor, you will get the same problems no matter what.

To demonstrate this, you can open TextEdit and see what happens when you try to use "Helvetica Neue" for Tibetan, it will jump to Kailasa.

Maybe this automated process is also broken in some cases and you are not used to the fact that some fonts doesn't support Tibetan for it was changed automatically without noticing you.

Just make sure to use a font which supports Tibetan like Kailasa, Monlam, Quomolangma, Microsoft Himalaya etc.

Best wishes...

Could you provide a screen shot that shows what you are talking about? Please provide the url for the web page shown in the screen shot.

Do you have the problem in all of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome?

Do you have the problem in Pages and TextEdit for documents?

It's fine for me on web pages and in Pages documents, but in the dictionary, some entries are corrupted. The Tibetan only dictionary seems to be fine (Monlam) but the Rangjung Yeshe additions are not displaying properly. They did before the update.