We have just put up a Lao Unicode sample page (text taken from a Lao
cultural study) at <http://www.tavultesoft.com/lswin/unicode/> and a
halfway decent Lao font, Saysettha Unicode is available from this page.
Currently, as far as I am aware, Lao line breaking will work correctly only
with ZWSP (U+200B) as no vendor-supplied syllable splitting or
dictionary-based splitting functionality available for any OS. Note that
Lao sentences do not usually have spaces between words. James, have you
had any different experiences with this? I would be very interested in
hearing about it, if so.
I include below some more general information on Lao input and display
under Windows from John Durdin.
Marc Durdin
Tavultesoft
=====================
John Durdin wrote:
A number of Lao Unicode fonts have been developed and have been distributed
(for test purposes) for the past three months as part of Lao Script for
Windows Version 5.4, from the website http://www.tavultesoft.com/lswin/ .
These fonts can be used for Lao text display in any applications that
support Unicode, including HTML (for IE5 - I haven't checked Netscape) and
PDF documents, but Unicode text entry is problematic. LSWin 5.4 provides
input mapping (with dictionary-based word-wrap) for applications on Windows
NT/2000/XP generally, and for Word 97/2000/XP on Windows 9x. Tavultesoft
have also developed a keyboard control program for Lao Unicode (with
syllable-based word-wrap) using KeyMan 5 (http://www.tavultesoft.com/keyman/).
For Windows 2000/XP (and possibly NT4), it is also possible to create a
keyboard DLL that adds system-level mapping on Lao Unicode. However, it is
not possible to implement word wrap (by automatic break insertion) with
such a DLL (and Microsoft have no immediate plans to implement word wrap
for Lao at the system level, either). A key on the keyboard can be used to
insert the Unicode ZWSP code, however, so for applications that don't like
an external keyboard mapper (and/or if you are willing to enter the breaks
yourself), this is a useful option.
Please be aware that existing (non-Unicode) Lao fonts will often be
superior to Lao Unicode fonts, since the Lao Unicode standard does not
provide support for context-dependent glyph substitution and positioning.
The long-term answer to this is (probably) OpenType, and I have prototyped
OpenType Lao Unicode fonts that demonstrate the practicality of much higher
quality typography than has so far been possible. But this depends on the
use of an updated Uniscribe engine, which has not yet been distributed
generally by Microsoft. In the short term, the fonts mentioned above
include extensions to Unicode (in the PUA) that provide the same
context-dependent functionality found in existing Lao fonts such as
Saysettha Lao.
If you need further information, please contact me directly at
jmdurdin@tavultesoft.com.
John Durdin
At 06:56 PM 12/12/2001 -0800, James Kass wrote:
>I took text from several of the pages at the Lao Gate site and made
>a simple conversion to Unicode in order to get lengthy runs of Lao
>text. I needed to see line breaks being handled and the display on
>actual running text.
>
>The data table for the conversion has been sent along to Mark Leisher
>for possible inclusion to his CSets distribution.
>
>Best regards,
>
>James Kass.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Dec 13 2001 - 01:57:29 EST