Thaana on the Mac

I intended to write mostly about my thoughts on society, law and politics on this blog, but today is a 'slightly' different day. I have been a mac user for over 4 years now and ever since I moved to the Mac I have never looked back. Goodbye windows - for good, although the Mac had one (and only one) handicap that bothered me - its incompatibility with the dhivehi script! I work in a profession where typing in dhivehi is quite important and I had to resolve buying a PC for the office (which to every mac user out there, would be an unforgivable sin). Ever since then, I have been looking for a working solution for the problem.

And then (drum roll)...I met Fala (Ibrahim Falah) who had found a perfect solution. Therefore, all credit goes to Fala for researching and coming up with what i am simply reproducing below.

Here you go...

First you need to get a software called Mallel. Some of your may already have it but if you want to export to MS Word, you need to download version 2.6 which was out just a few months ago. Mallel is available at http://www.redlers.com/index.html and can be bought for 49 USD.

Second, you need to download the thaana keyboard layout for OSX (which i have bundled with some dhivehi fonts) and is available for download at http://web.me.com/shahdy

Once the file is downloaded, unpack it with the password provided at the website. Then copy the thaana.bundle file into the 'Keyboard Layouts' folder which you can find in the 'Libary' folder located in your root directory. (Note that there are a couple of Library folders depending on how many users you have, so make sure you put it into the Keyboard Layouts folder in the Library folder which i located on your Mac HD root directory).

Same for the fonts. Install them on the 'Fonts' directory located in the Library folder of the root.

Once you install the files, go to 'System Preferences' and then to the 'International' tab. From there go to the 'Input Menu' and scroll down to find 'Thaana' with a small Maldivian flag. Check it, and then check the 'Show input menu in menu bar' option. Now close system preferences. You should now be able to select 'Thaana' at the menu bar and once selected, the Maldivian flag would be visible on the menu bar.

Once Thaana is selected from the menu bar, goto Mellel and change Paragraph Direction to 'right to left' and there you go! You should now be able to write in dhivehi flawlessly. If you buy Mellel 2.6, you can export as a word document which fellow users can open in MS Word.

Next question, how do you open a MS Word file. There is a small trick to this. Open the file in Word for mac and copy the whole document as is. Paste it in Mellel, select all and click on 'Paragraph Direction' icon and there you go! You can now edit the document with all the original ms word formatting etc.

Let me know if you have any problems and once again, all thanks (and credit) goes to Fala for this!