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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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.
