[ID: A gif of the character Rene from Tamil film Natchathiram Nagargirathu dancing in the middle of a circle with her theatre troupe playing instruments and hyping her up. The text reads “guide to using senthamil fonts” that are on the right side with three different Tamil fonts that translate to Senthamil, ending with the word in English. /END ID].
I do not remember where or how I found this pack of Tamil fonts but after having the Senthamil font pack (all 285 of them) hanging out on my desktop for however many years, through some messing around and ctrl Z-in my way out of some fuck-ups, I finally have a handle on how to use them in photoshop(and other applications).
For a video tutorial, this one is very thorough and helpful one, it is in Tamil but pretty easy to follow and understand. If you have any questions please feel free to send asks here on userdramas or to me at @therukurals as well. The steps are below the cut.
1. Download Senthamil fonts, you can access via this folder here. I have also made a Cheat Sheet which has some shortcuts and all the fonts written out so you can easily find what you would like.
2. Download Azhagi+ from the website. Hover over the Downloads in the top right corner of the site and click on the 1st link (for Windows). Refer to the section outlined in orange. You can download in Mac if you use winehq.org to help run windows installations. Find out more here. And just a note, I am a windows user so I am not familiar with how well this works on Mac.
3. Set up your shortcut keys: In the section outlined by blue, uncheck all the boxes to clear each language keyboards hotkeys. I do this just for ease of use and also for not accidentally turning on another keyboard setting. This also allows me to use whatever hotkey I want for the Senthamil font setting. To set up your hotkey for Senthamil, refer to the section outlined in orange. Click on Tamil (under the Language L heading) then Stmzh_P (under the Font Encoding F heading) and then Phonetic Transliteration ( Keyboard Layout K heading). It will then pull it up in the section outlined in blue, you can then set the key to whatever you’d like (given you’ve unchecked the all the boxes first) I personally chose ctrl + shift + 9.
And you’re set to go!
4. To use in photoshop (or any other application like word, powerpoint, excel etc) first, make sure to launch the Azhagi+ app. It needs to be running for the hotkey to work. Then enter in your hotkey (for me I would then click Ctrl + Shift + 9) and with the senthamil font i want to use selected, I can type in Tamil phonetically via my English keyboard. Do note that your english key function then will not be working and to switch back using the same hotkey.
Just a note that you can use this process (minus the specific pathway for Senthamil) on other languages and keyboards from South Asia.
