Digital Syriac Corpus Documentation

Syriaca.org uses CSS3 Web Fonts to display Syriac fonts. This allows users to view the correct Syriac fonts when viewing Syriaca.org content, without requiring any font installations.

If you would like to work with Syriaca.org content offline it may still be necessary to install Syriac fonts. Please follow the steps below to install fonts locally.

Syriaca.org is best viewed using either the Firefox or Chrome browsers. Please try Syriaca.org in one of these recommended browsers to see if your problem persists before proceeding to the solutions below.

Mac OS

Common Solution: Install fonts

If you cannot view Syriac characters you likely need to install a unicode Syriac font (the Mac OS does not come with any Syriac fonts). Syriaca.org recommends you install the Meltho family of Fonts available free from Beth Mardutho. We recommend you install at least Estrangelo Edessa, though you may wish to install all the fonts.

Note: Mac users may get an installation error because the Meltho fonts were originally designed for Windows. Please follow this protocol:

1. Open each individual font icon in the Meltho Folder.
2. Once the "Font Book" window opens, select "Install Font."
3. A message will display, "Problems may have been found with some fonts during validation. Please review the reported problem before continuing…. One minor problem was found. Proceed with caution."
4. Check the box "Select all fonts."
5. Select "Install checked."

Even with Meltho or other fonts installed there is also a known conflict with Apple's default rendering of the ܘ (waw) character when a conflicting Arabic font is installed.

Windows

Common Solution: Install fonts

Most versions of Windows come with Estrangelo Edessa preinstalled. If you would like to see Syriac text in other scripts (Serto or East Syriac), we recommend you install the Meltho family of Fonts available free from Beth Mardutho.

Mobile (iOS and Android)

Common Solution: At this time users are reporting that our CSS allows Syriac text to display correctly on mobile devices. Please contact us using the feedback link below if this is not the case for you.

Linux

Common Solution: Install fonts

Syriac can be supported on some distributions of the Linux operating system. If you cannot view Syriac characters you likely need to install a unicode Syriac font. Syriaca.org recommends you install the Meltho family of Fonts available free from Beth Mardutho. Notes: We recommend you install at least Estrangelo Edessa, though you may wish to install all the fonts.

oXygen XML Editor

All of the underlying TEI data from Syriaca.org can be downloaded as raw XML files and viewed in an XML editor. The following guidelines explain how to configure one application, the oXygen XML Editor, to display Syriac. These guidelines assume that one has already installed the Meltho family of fonts from Beth Mardutho as described above.

The standard release of the oXygen XML Editor software employs Java 8, which does not support the right-to-left connecting characters necessary for typing Syriac. However, there is an alternate distribution of oXygen that employs OpenJDK instead of Java, and OpenJDK does support the use of Syriac scripts. The OpenJDK version of oXygen is available on the oXygen XML Editor downloads page underneath the standard release (look for the link that says “Includes OpenJDK...”). See the links for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.