Tools for acquiring Amharic text.

Tools for acquiring Amharic text

Ethiopic Encodings

There are a large number of Ethiopic encodings, transliterations, and transcriptions that have been used at one time or another. A pretty comprehensive list of them is available at http://libeth.sourceforge.net/CharacterSets.html.

Typing Amharic text on Windows 2000/XP.

Download the following file and install it on your system: http://ftp.geez.org/pub/fonts/TrueType/amh-uni.exe. Once the package is installed, view the following pages (in Amharic) for instructions on how to type Amharic with the SERA system:

Once you have it installed, open the document you are viewing/editing and select the Amharic keyboard from the "K" icon in the taskbar, on the right-hand side of the toolbar.

To disable Amharic input, select the "No Keymap keyboard" option from the "K" icon on the taskbar.

Amharic font

The Unicode font that is installed by the keyboard package above is available separately as ftp://ftp.ethiopic.org/pub/fonts/TrueType/gfzemenu.ttf.

Converting Amharic text to Unicode - eth2utf8

Currently, the eth2utf8 program only works on Linux/Unix.

To use eth2utf8, the libeth library must be downloaded and installed on your system first.

libeth is available from ftp://ftp.geez.org/pub/libeth/libeth-0.34e.tar.gz.

eth2utf8 Sources:

The command line is: eth2utf8 [-l|-c input-encoding] [file1 file2 ...]

-l list all of the input encodings supported.

-c input-encoding the input encoding from the list above.

file1.... If no filenames are provided for conversion, input is expected from stdin. Otherwise all files will be opened, converted to UTF-8 and sent to stdout.

-l	list all of the input encodings supported.
-c input-encoding	the input encoding from the list above.
file1....	If no filenames are provided for conversion, input is expected from stdin. Otherwise all files will be opened, converted to UTF-8 and sent to stdout.