Before you begin, please check a couple of things
1) DISPLAYING LAKOTA FONT
The Standard Lakota Orthography (SLO) is Unicode based and as such it is supported by the majority of web browsers (as well as text editors). For viewing this forum, however, we recommend that you use FireFox (a web browser freely downloadable from http://www.mozilla.com) because it is more reliable than Internet Explorer in terms of displaying the Lakota fonts.
Anyhow, we utilize a technology of web-fonts, which all the modern browsers support. So you should see Lakota letters even if you have no Lakota-specific fonts installed on your PC.
CHECK UP for the display of fonts:
If you see the same character here as on the image below, then your fonts display correctly (not necessarily in the same font):
č ǧ ȟ š ž
- characters.jpg (14.39 KiB) Viewed 20552 times
If the characters do not display properly on your computer, please try to use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer or download and install the Lakota font (download here:
LakhotaGmigmeya.ttf- (137.04 KiB) Downloaded 2914 times
2) TYPING LAKOTA
For typing the Standard Lakota Orthography members of this forum can use a virtual keyboard. This keyboard is available below each "POST" window (appears after you click POST-REPLY, POST-NEW-TOPIC, or QUOTE).
Below the empty text box you will see a button "Turn Lakota keyboard ON". When you click on this a graphic representation of the keyboard appears. You can click on it using your mouse but the better option is to simply start typing using the keyboard attached to your computer. The Virtual Keyboard now remapped the layout of your keyboard (only for the typing in the POST window). When you want to type English again, you can turn the Virtual Keyboard off with the button "Turn Lakota keyboard ON".
If you switch from Lakota to English and back very often, turning virtual keyboard on and off each time may be uncomfortable. Alternatively, you can switch from Lakota to English and back using the Caps Lock key:
- After turning Lakota keyboard on, you can type in Lakota straight away. If you want to type in English, select Caps Lock. You can return to Lakota by deselecting Caps Lock.
-remember: Caps Lock ON = English, Caps Lock OFF = Lakota.
The special Lakota characters are placed on the following keys:
ȟ is on J
ǧ is on Q
š is on R
č is on C
ž is on X
ŋ is on F
For stressed vowels type the vowel followed by apostrophe.
á type a'
é type e'
í type i'
ó type o'
ú type u'
N.B. Some national keyboards (as England) have the apostrophe key at the unusual place (not the rightmost key at the ASDF row). If you cannot type apostrophe properly you have to manually select the non-standard keyboard from the dropping list at the virtual keyboard, starting with "Standard" option.
Note that the virtual keyboard has many auto-corrections programmed in it so when you type, certain predictable spelling errors are corrected.
Below is the image of the Virtual Keyboard:
- VK.jpg (46.37 KiB) Viewed 20605 times
The Virtual Keyboard enables you to type Lakota only in this forum (or other web-page where it is installed).
If you want to type Lakota in other software utilities like MS Word, you can purchase the Lakota Keyboard and Fonts Bundle (see the other post in this forum).
