Amharic not showing
What you see tells you which problem you have
When Amharic doesn’t show up, it is one of three different faults — and they have three different answers. One is the font, one is the document, and one has no answer at all. Telling them apart takes nothing but a look.
ሳጥን
What are you seeing instead?
The four panels below are the same two words every time. The first is how it should read; the other three are the three faults. Find the one your document looks like.
How it should read
ሰላም ለዓለም
Real Unicode Amharic. The two words mean “hello world”.
Empty boxes
An illustration in which one empty rectangle stands in place of each letter.
Your text is fine — the machine just has nothing to draw it with. A box means “I couldn’t draw this letter”, not “this letter is missing”.
Latin letters and punctuation
c?§U K¯K?U
This is not a font problem at all. The document doesn’t hold Amharic — it holds these Latin letters, and an old font used to draw Amharic shapes over the top of them.
Question marks
??? ????
This is the bad one. The letters are gone, and nothing left in the file records what they were. The tell is that there is nothing else in it — question marks and spaces, with no other characters mixed in.
Boxes: the machine has no Ethiopic font
Most systems today arrive with an Ethiopic font — Windows has Nyala, Macs have Kefa, Android and Chromebooks have Noto Sans Ethiopic. So boxes usually mean a very old machine, or a stripped-down installation. Noto Sans Ethiopic is free, and installing it fixes this without touching the document at all.
Latin letters: the document isn’t Amharic
Before Unicode, this is how Amharic was typed: the file stores Latin letters, and a special font draws Amharic shapes over them. Send it anywhere that font isn’t installed and the shapes fall away. Installing a font won’t fix it — the text has to be converted. The converter is here, it runs in your browser, and your file is never sent anywhere.
If you know the font’s name, go straight to its page: PowerGeez or Visual Geez. If you don’t, that’s fine — the converter works the readings out of the file itself and shows you what each one makes of it.
Question marks: the letters are gone
This happens when text holding Amharic is saved in a way that can’t hold Amharic. The program replaced every letter it couldn’t write with a question mark. What’s left is text of roughly the same shape holding nothing at all: every question mark is identical, and nothing in the file records which letter stood where.
The thing to do isn’t on the file — look for an earlier copy: an email attachment, a backup, the original with whoever sent it to you. And when you next save, pick UTF-8 if you’re offered a choice. That’s the one that holds all of Amharic.
If it’s on a site you’re building
If your page looks right on your machine and shows boxes on someone else’s, the difference is the font on the visitor’s machine — so ship an Ethiopic font with the page. Replacing the Amharic with an image is not an answer: an image can’t be searched, copied, enlarged or read aloud.
Questions
- Will installing a font fix my old document?
If you’re seeing boxes, yes. If you’re seeing Latin letters, no — it only becomes readable on the one machine you installed that font on. Converting makes it readable everywhere.
- Why do I only see boxes on my phone?
Because a font installed on your computer isn’t on your phone. They’re two different machines looking at the same file — which also tells you the document is fine.
- Some letters show and some don’t. What’s that?
It means the font you have doesn’t hold all of the Ethiopic script — some carry the common letters and leave out the rarer ones. A complete font fixes it, and there’s nothing wrong with the text.