Mark Durdin wrote,
> 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. > Perfect. This is great and thank you for making it available. > 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. U+200B forces the line break in reasonable locations. On text without U+200B, the browser breaks the text mainly at punctuation, which can mean some fairly uneven right margins. My fear was that the browser may split syllables inappropriately while the screen size was being expanded or contracted by the user. This is what seems to happen with, for example, Pahawh Hmong in the PUA and also visually entered Hebrew with cantillation marks. With Hmong, the display will just show a letter at the end of one line, and the next line will begin with the mark which should have applied to the previous letter. When this happens with visual Hebrew, it causes an application crash on this system. > John Durdin wrote: > > 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. The Lao Gate web site seems to favor placing their text in narrow columns, using <br> tags in the HTML to force clean line breaks. With the use of special glyphs for certain combinations, either in a non-standard font or in the PUA, users can get an adequate display. I think John Durdin is absolutely right about OpenType as the solution for the future. (The updated Uniscribe engine is installed here, hopefully it will become generally available soon.) Best regards, James Kass.
