Jonathon -
Thanks for the response; I get the sense that, like many other areas of
LibreOffice, development relies entirely on a volunteer who happens to have
the time, happens to have the inclination, happens to have familiarity with
the subject matter (in this case, rather arcane I guess), happens to be
familiar with any side effects of his/her efforts, and happens to be a
decent enough coder to not break anything. Coupled with those
characteristics, some knowledgeable user/tester/guinea pig(s) would need to
be available. Given the statistical improbabilities there, I suppose we live
with what we have.
Re: your request "can you recommend one or two _good_ Thai fonts?"
Well, "good" is somewhat dependent on your own esthetics as well as the
purpose for which the fonts are to be used. It would also depend on whether
you will be mixing Thai with English, or even with multiple other
languages/scripts.
Nonetheless, here is a list of some fonts to look at (all are free).
FreeSerif (In a class by itself)
FreeSerif is a fairly complete Unicode font that includes Thai as well
as most scripts I've ever had a need for. The advantages of this font are a)
it's not at all bad looking, b) there is no need to experiment with matching
sizes across scripts (more about that below), and c) it's free for any
purpose.
The disadvantage is that, as far as I know, the only matching
sans-serif version (Free Sans) only includes western glyphs.
Droid Sans Thai
Garuda (Sans)
Kinnari (Serif)
Loma (Sans)
Norasi (Serif)
NotoSansThai (part of Google's project)
NotoSerifThai (part of Google's project)
Purisa (Casual)
Sawasdee (Sans)
Tlwg Mono (fixed)
Tlwg Typist (fixed)
Umpush (Sans)
Waree (Sans)
The fonts listed above all include basic Latin glyphs as well as Thai
glyphs. In other words, they are useful for mixing Thai and English (and
limited other western scripts). In some cases (e.g. Droid Sans), you can
obtain similar fonts for other glyph sets/languages and, I suppose, make
your own custom language combinations using FontForge or something similar,
although I haven't tried that. All the fonts listed are free as well. I
should note that Microsoft also offers some suitable fonts that can be found
on the internet, but the licensing/permissions on these is unclear to me, so
I don't use them unless required by a client.
Mixing Thai font glyphs with Western glyphs is complicated because of the
way Thai characters are formed. There is no upper case, so the shift key
just gives you access to additional, less frequently used characters, but
there are tall and short letters that can appear to non-Thai speakers as
capitals. Several (though not all) vowels in Thai are symbols placed above
or below the consonents they are joined with. Coupled with the fact that
Thai not only has what we would call accents, but - being a tonal language -
has tone marks that can also go above some syllables.
Because there are lots of combinations, the placement of some of these
additional glyphs may change depending on how many of them need to go above
the same character at the same time.
Because of these characters, more vertical space is typically required above
and below lines of Thai text; this isn't a big deal if the paragraphs are
either all in English (for instance) or all in Thai, but if the two
languages are mixed in the same line, getting things to look clean takes a
bit of planning when choosing what fonts to use.
The best way to illustrate this is to download the Thai Font Book at
http://ftp.opentle.org/pub/national-fonts/FONTBOOK.PDF. Although the book is
written in Thai (go figure!), the numerous illustrations of how all these
things should work (in way more detail than I'm providing here) are pretty
self-explanatory even if you don't read a word of Thai. Begin on page 13
which shows how the Thai character analogs to what we refer to as ascenders,
descenders, x-height and such things are defined. The very next page shows
how to line up Thai and western charcters next to each other in order to
look good. The illustrations are very numerous and very well done.
The bottom line, though, is that if you plan to use multiple languages in a
single document without needing to worry too much about making things go
together, FreeSerif is (again, so far as I am aware) the only go-to font
that will let you do that.
I hope this helps a bit.
P.S. TomD: if you're lurking as usual, can you add this and the parts of my
earlier posting from a year or so ago to whatever resources the doc team
might eventually use to document font usage in LO?? Thanks.
--
View this message in context:
http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Fonts-Font-Substitutions-Languages-Graphite-Justification-etc-tp4142599p4142942.html
Sent from the Documentation mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
--
To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected]
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
