Tsulehisanvhi - Cherokee Language Text Editor

Introduction

The Tsulehisanvhi Cherokee Language Text Editor is an application designed to make it easy to compose documents in the Cherokee syllabary. The Cherokee Nation has created a font to represent the Cherokee syllabary, but in order to use it you were required to learn a complex and unnatural keyboard mapping. This made it difficult to quickly compose a document in the Cherokee syllabary. This is the reason I decided to create this application. This editor automatically converts the phonetic representation of the Cherokee language into the syllabary using the official Cherokee font. This makes it much easier to type a document in Cherokee.

Download

Version 0.3.2 of the software for Microsoft Windows is now available. Just click on the link below and save the "SetupTsulehisanvhi.exe" file to your hard drive.

Then run the installer by double clicking on the file. Follow the instructions. You must also have the official Cherokee font installed on your computer. The font is distributed with the program and is located in the "Font" directory underneath the CherokeeEditor directory. Copy the Cherokee.ttf file to the "Fonts" folder inside the Control Panel. See the README.txt file located in the "Font" directory for more details.
Download it (approximately 7Mb).
NOTE: This software is "alpha" quality software which means that it may contain bugs and has not been tested extensively. It is also probably not very user-friendly. If you find any problems or have suggestions for improvements to the software, feel free to email me at cherokeeeditor@cox.net. I will do my best to fix problems as quickly as possible.

Cost

There is no cost for this software. It is an "open-source" program which means that it is free and the source code is available. Furthermore, the license permits you to change the source code if you want to improve the program. For license details see the help screen of the program.

Name

The name "Tsulehisanvhi" means "Phoenix" in Cherokee, this is the name of the newspaper founded by the Cherokee Nation in 1828 which was published in both Cherokee and English. I have named this program in honor of the Cherokee Phoenix. I hope that it contributes in some small way to a rebirth of the Cherokee language.

Release History

• Version 0.3.2
  • Make phonetic pane have the focus when application starts.
  • Punctuation is always black in the syllabary pane, only errors are red.
  • Rich text no longer allowed in phonetic pane.
• Version 0.3.1
  • Changed the name to Tsulehisanvhi, no functionality changes.
  • Application now appears in the "Add/Remove Programs" applet of the Control Panel.
• Version 0.3 - initial release

Future Plans

Some of the possible enhancement in future versions:

• The ability to save the syllabary text as RTF (Rich Text Format).
• Support for other operating systems, Linux, possibly Mac OSX.
• The ability to convert from the syllabary back to the phonetic representation.
• Improved documentation.
• Support for other Cherokee fonts and Unicode fonts which support the Cherokee glyphs