Lontar

Support: Aksara Nusantara

On this page, “iOS” means both iOS and iPadOS, version 15.0 or higher.

Which iOS fonts support the characters of traditional Indonesian scripts?

For Balinese, Javanese, Lontara’ (Buginese), Rejang, and Sundanese, iOS 15 and later come with older versions of fonts from the Noto family, which is published by Google. These fonts are reasonably functional overall, but exhibit rendering issues in some situations.

For Batak, iOS 15 and 16 comes with an older version of Noto Sans Batak that fails to correctly order the characters within closed syllables such as ᯖᯪᯇ᯲ tip, where the vowel  ᯪ i should be shown between the final consonant ᯇ pa and the virama  ᯲. iOS 17 and later come with a newer version of the same font that renders such syllables correctly. Batak users should therefore upgrade to iOS 17 or later.

For Kawi and Makasar, iOS provides no fonts at all.

Which fonts does the Aksara Nusantara app provide?

The Aksara Nusantara app comes with a set of fonts that enable better rendering than the fonts that come with iOS.

The fonts Ubud, Yogya, Tantular Kawi, Makassar, and Bandung have been engineered by Norbert Lindenberg for optimal rendering on iOS.

How do I make these fonts available to other apps?

To make fonts provided by the Aksara Nusantara available to other apps, go to the Font pane of the app, tap the button showing the fonts to be installed, and confirm that you want to install. Note that these fonts can only be used in apps that provide a font menu, such as Pages, Keynote, Mail, or Notability. In addition, the fonts Noto Sans Batak and Noto Sans Rejang used by the Aksara Nusantara app can not be made available to other apps because iOS already has older versions of them.

Which iOS keyboards support input of characters of traditional Indonesian scripts?

iOS 17 and later provide a keyboard for Rejang. Otherwise, iOS does not support input of characters of traditional Indonesian scripts.

Which keyboards does the Aksara Nusantara app provide?

The Aksara Nusantara app provides keyboards for all traditional Indonesian scripts that are currently encoded in Unicode:

In which order do I type characters on these keyboards?

All Indonesian scripts except Batak have one or more vowels of which at least one component is written to the left of the consonant they belong to. The keyboards vary somewhat in how they support of such vowels:

The Kawi repha 𑼂◌ is discussed below.

Otherwise, you don’t need to worry about the order of characters within a syllable – the keyboards will reorder them as needed to avoid dotted circles. For example, if you type first -ng, then -u (for any script that has both), the keyboards reorder to -u-ng.

How do the keyboards support input of conjunct forms?

The Balinese, Javanese, and Kawi keyboards support direct input of conjunct forms (gantungan, gempelan, pasangan) with their own keys. The delete key removes the complete sequence. If a Balinese adeg adeg ◌᭄ or a Javanese pangkon ◌꧀ is entered, the keyboard adds the Unicode character ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER to prevent it from creating a conjunct form with a subsequent consonant.

The Sundanese keyboard does not support conjunct forms.

The Batak, Lontara’, Makasar, and Rejang scripts don’t have conjunct forms.

How does the Kawi keyboard support repha?

The Kawi repha 𑼂◌ should be typed before the consonant on top of which it will be displayed. You will see a dotted circle (◌) taking the place of the expected consonant until you type that consonant.

The repha character has two distinct uses in Kawi. Normally, the character is used as an actual repha, where the initial vowel-less ra of a cluster is written as a mark above the second consonant. In some late manuscripts, however, the character is used as a final consonant, like its modern cognates Balinese surang, Javanese layar, and Sundanese panglayar. In both cases, the character needs to be entered in the position that corresponds to its use as repha, before the base consonant of the cluster. Here’s the word hañjurniŋ with the key sequences necessary when using the repha character either as a repha in the third cluster or as a final consonant in the second cluster:

Input of repha

How do I make these keyboards available to other apps?

To make the keyboards of the Aksara Nusantara app available to other apps, go to the Keyboard pane of the app, and follow the instructions there. The keyboards generally work in all apps that don’t specifically exclude the use of third-party apps. However, some apps prevent the use of characters that they don’t know about yet; for example, Kawi is supported in Apple’s apps Pages, Keynote, and Numbers only from iOS 16.4.

Why do some keyboards show some characters in color?

Some Indonesian scripts have digits that look like letters or punctuation of the same script. For example, the Javanese digit one, ꧑, looks like the letter ꦒ (ga). However, in Unicode digits are separate characters, and some software, such as spreadsheets, may depend on the distinction. The keyboards therefore highlights the digits in color.

Other questions?