Atuta

Until 1994, I had to use a DOS program called "MLS" to type in Assyrian. This was okay for a while until I felt we needed a Assyrian program that would type in Assyrian. But it was not possible for me to write the program. So I came up with the idea of creating "Atuta, the Assyrian font for Windows" which I use up-to-day in programs like "PrintMaster", "PageMaker", "CorelDraw", "Adobe Illustrator" and so forth to print and publish printing material in Assyrian. The benefit of "Atuta" is that the Assyrian Alphabet is transiliated; which means in order to type letter "Allap" in Assyrian, you use the ordinary English Computer keyboad and type the letter "A". To type "Bet" in Assyrian, type "b" in in English, to type "Jammal", type "j", and for "taow", type in letter "t". It's that simple. Of course, there are some letters that cannot be fouond on the English keyboard, so cannot be transiliated exactly the way they sound, like: "chap", "ghammal", "khait", or "taow-allap", etc. We have to keep in mind, the Assyrian letters with the extra additions on them are more than 40 letters, where English has only 26. A list of these special characters is included the package to make it easy to find those extra letters on the keyboard. I have been using this technique in Chicago since 1997, and since then, with the help of Mr. Issa Benyamin, the master of Assyrian fonts and the Assyrian Calligraphy I have added 6 more fonts to the set.