TermaType: A Word Processor the Tibetan Language Has Never Had

I write a lot in Tibetan. Notes, documents, short pieces for the community. And for years, every time I sat down to write, I went through the same quiet ritual of frustration: find the right keyboard driver, hope it works on this version of the operating system, open a word processor not built for this script, and accept that something will go wrong — a stack that renders incorrectly, a cursor that jumps to the wrong position, a font that suddenly falls back to a generic box.

I kept thinking: there must be a better way. And then I looked and found that there wasn’t.

The Tool That Doesn’t Exist

The only software built specifically as a Tibetan word processor is called TibetDoc. It was first developed in the 1980s. It runs only on Windows. It requires a paid license. There is no Mac version. There is no Linux version. There is nothing that runs in a browser.

LibreOffice — the open-source office suite used by millions — only became usable for Tibetan in September 2024. That’s when a developer finally fixed a bug that BDRC’s own CTO had reported back in 2015. Nine years. And even now, LibreOffice has no Tibetan keyboard built in, no dictionary lookup, no understanding of how Tibetan text works. It’s a general tool someone patched, not something built for us.

The tools built for Tibetan are either dead, Windows-only, or someone else’s tool awkwardly adapted.

For a language spoken by over six million people — a language that carries one of the world’s great philosophical and literary traditions — this is a remarkable gap.

Why This Matters More Now

When I wrote about the language we lose, I tried to describe what it means when a language starts to disappear quietly, without anyone forcing it, just through the slow drift of convenience. That piece was about diaspora children and the invisible pull of assimilation.

But there is another front to this.

Inside Tibet, Tibetan-medium schooling has collapsed. Enrollment in Tibetan-medium schools fell from nearly 24,000 students in 2012 to around 13,000 in 2024 — a 45% drop in twelve years. Tibetan language classes have been removed from curricula across entire prefectures. Private tutoring in Tibetan was banned in parts of Tibet during the 2025 winter break.

This means the diaspora — the communities in Dharamsala, in New York, in Europe, in the monasteries and schools outside Tibet — is increasingly the primary carrier of the written tradition. The scholars, the translators, the teachers, the monks writing commentaries, the journalists, the parents trying to write letters to their children in Tibetan: they need a professional tool. And they don’t have one.

TermaType is that tool.

What TermaType Is

TermaType is a free, open-source word processor built entirely for Tibetan script. It runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux. No subscription. No license fee. No Windows-only restriction.

It includes things no other tool offers in one place:

• A built-in Tibetan keyboard — type Tibetan directly using standard QWERTY keys, with automatic consonant stack building and vowel placement, no OS-level driver required
• Live dictionary lookup — a panel that searches 64 Tibetan dictionaries and 316,000+ entries as you write, pulling from sources like Monlam, Rangjung Yeshe, Jäschke, Hopkins, 84000, and more
• Tibetan-aware typography — designed for how Tibetan text actually works, not how English text works
• Standard document formats — save, open, and share documents that work with other tools
• Unicode throughout — every character output is standard Unicode, compatible with archives, libraries, and digital preservation systems

We have a working version running right now. This is not a concept — it’s software that exists.

We Are Applying for a Grant

To bring TermaType from a working prototype to a stable, distributed application — properly packaged for all platforms, with installers, automatic updates, spell-check, and a traditional pecha layout mode — we need resources.

We are seeking funding to make this happen. We are requesting support to cover the development work needed to deliver a fully polished release.

If funded, here is what that grant will deliver:

Native desktop application on all platforms. Proper installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Code-signed and notarised so your operating system trusts it. Automatic updates so you always have the latest version without hunting for downloads.

Standalone Tibetan IME library. The keyboard input system we built — which converts QWERTY keystrokes into correctly stacked Tibetan Unicode without any OS driver — will be extracted and published as an independent open-source library. Any developer building a Tibetan-language application can use it freely.

Tibetan spell-check. Integration with Botok, the open-source Tibetan tokenizer and morphological analyser, to underline unknown words and suggest corrections — something no freely available Tibetan text tool has ever offered.

Offline dictionary. A bundled dictionary for when you are working without an internet connection, so the lookup panel works everywhere.

Pecha layout mode. Support for the traditional Tibetan book format — the long horizontal pecha pages, appropriate margins and line spacing, correct multi-column layout — so that people producing traditional texts have a proper tool for the job.

Documentation in Tibetan and English. A user guide written for the communities who will actually use this: monks, students, journalists, teachers, scholars.

Open Source, Always

TermaType will be released under the AGPL-3.0 open-source license. Everything we build — including the IME library — will be freely available for anyone to use, study, adapt, and improve.

This is not a product. There is no business model. It is infrastructure for a language that needs it.

The dictionary that powers the lookup panel — 64 sources, 316,000+ entries — is ours, built and maintained as part of the Tibetan Library project. The fonts are open source. The code will be public. Every piece of this is designed to outlast any single organization or individual, including me.

Follow Along

We will share updates on the funding search and development progress here. If you are a Tibetan studies scholar, educator, translator, or community organisation who would like to be involved in beta testing, I would love to hear from you.

The Tibetan language has carried an extraordinary body of knowledge across fourteen centuries. The people preserving it today deserve tools that work.