Snow Leopard UPDATE. As of now (MAC OS 10.6.1), Snow Leopard does not recognise fonts with the extension ‘.otf’ (e.g., the Meltho fonts mentioned below). But there is an easy fix.

Download the Meltho font from here. Then change the extentions ‘.otf’ into ‘.ttf’. Each time, the system will ask you whether you are sure. Say yes. Then install the fonts by clicking on them and following the instructions in font book. That's it

Older information, valid up to Mac OS Leopard (10.5):

For those like myself who mostly type Arabic, but occasionally need Syriac, the following information might be useful.

A number of attractive and free fonts are available from Beth Mardutha (click here ).

With the help of the fantastic and free Ukelele, I have written a Syriac Keyboard layout which is based on the Arabic one, and can be downloaded here. It needs to be put into the folder /Library/Keyboard Layouts on the HD, together with this icon, if you want a special icon in the keyboard menu. Since the keyboard layout is written in XML, it can easily be edited and modified with Ukelele. This is the second version of the keyboard layout, which addresses problems with combining dots [30 May 2009].

Writing Syriac works extremely well with Mellel; just make sure that both primary and secondary fonts are set to a Syriac font, otherwise, there will be problems with the Seyame (Unicode combining diacritic U+0308, COMBINING DIAERESIS).

For an alternative version, based on the Hebrew QWERTY, click here.