Sinhala - QWERTY Input Source

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Sinhala - QWERTY Input Source

I am not familiar with what's included in the Unicode standard for Sinhala. I was trying to use the "Sinhala - QWERTY" input source that comes with the latest version of OS X. However, I was not able to compose some words as they are usually written in Sinhala. For example, the name of the country, Sri Lanka, is written as :

ශ්රී ලංකා

However, I was not able to construct the first letter ශ්රී. The problem was attaching the flattened U like stroke under the main letter ශ. Is there a way to do this?

MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Dec 6, 2012 10:10 AM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,876 points

Dec 6, 2012 11:46 AM in response to ShiranC

I think the sequence is SRI. Are these photos from TextEdit correct? It may not look right when typed in the browser I see: ශ්රී

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Answer 2

ShiranC Author

Level 1

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Dec 7, 2012 9:48 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

What you have reproduced is exactly what I want. It is shown correctly in the browser too. However, using the "Sinhala - QWERTY" input source, which comes natively with OS X, and typing the letter sequence SRI gives me the Sinhala characters shown below:

සරි

Are you using a different input source or a different keyboard driver?

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,876 points

Dec 7, 2012 10:31 AM in response to ShiranC

ShiranC wrote:

typing the letter sequence SRI gives me the Sinhala characters shown below:

සරි

That is what you get typing "sri". You need to type "SRI", holding down the shift key.

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Answer 4

ShiranC Author

Level 1

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Dec 7, 2012 11:01 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanks! It works in the "TextEdit" app. However, when I use the "Pages" app it comes out as

ශ්රී

I found an article related to this http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/02/15/532394.aspx

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Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,876 points

Dec 7, 2012 11:22 AM in response to ShiranC

ShiranC wrote:

However, when I use the "Pages" app it comes out as

ශ්රී

Yes, I forgot that there is a longstanding bug in Pages, at least 4 years now, where it does not accept the ZWJ character, which can mess up certain some sequences in Farsi and some Indic languages. Copy/paste from TextEdit should work I think.

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Answer 6

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,876 points

Dec 8, 2012 4:34 PM in response to ShiranC

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2012/12/unicode-bug-in-pages.html

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