On 12/15/2013 10:16 AM, CVAlkan wrote:
Dale:To type and save documents in both Thai and English, which I do quite successfully with LibreOffice and several other products, you need to understand a few things that aren't at all obvious from the documentation. At the end, I'll suggest an easy way to handle multi-lingual documents. Since your difficulty is with LibreOffice Writer, let's start there. and look at a couple things: Open a new blank document. First, go to Format | Character and take a look at the Font tab. In the top section, titled "Western text font" you will see the font that is currently active. The next two sections ("Asian text font" and "CTL font") are key to understand what's going on. If your base font (the one listed in the top section) is NOT a Unicode font, or if it is a Unicode font that doesn't contain Thai characters, you will see the font that LibreOffice - in a not always successful attempt to be helpful - uses as substitutes when you type in a particular character. What happens, therefore, is that Libre Writer gives you the impression that all is wonderful even though it is doing substitutions behind your back. In itself a good thing, but sometimes leads to confusion. It also isn't very clear that "Asian text font" is NOT what you use for your Thai substitutions. Aside from the fact that Thai is actually an Indo-European language, the "Asian text font" section seems to be only applicable to languages that use ideographs (i.e. little pictures) even if they have alphabetic characters. It also relates to languages that are written vertically, although I'm not too sure about that as I don't speak Chinese, Korean, Japanese and similar languages. Now look at the "CTL font" section. What you want to do is to pick a font that you know supports Thai, and choose it in the "CTL font" section as a substitute. The font is listed first, then the size stuff, and then under Language, you would choose Thai to indicate which group of characters within the font are to be used. A CTL font is what's used for substitutions when you are using an "Input Method" to type on the keyboard. Since there are several of these in use it's hard to tell you anything specific, but you've probably already solved that, since I presume you do some typing in English, hit some switch command, type a little Thai, then use the switch command to get back to English. By the way, the default you will often see under CTL font is one of the Hindi fonts (I presume because of Thai's ancient relation to Indian languages) - in Ubuntu, for instance, it is almost always "Lohit Hindi" - a font that is part of the Ubuntu installation. I used Format | Character as an example to make the explanation more clear; obviously there are similar settings in various Paragraph and Style settings as well, and they all work the same. BUT - if you want to make things really simple, you could simply use a font that has both English and Thai characters present, so no substitutions need to take place. Unfortunately there isn't a great variety of really good looking fonts (I'll list some below), but the advantage is that there are no substitutions, and the font sizes are matched more closely than would be the case with two different fonts. This is a matter of taste of course, particularly with balancing Thai and English, since Thai nees room above and below the characters for the various superscript and subscript vowels, tone marks, and such things. (these same issues are not unique to Thai of course - you'll run into them in both Hebrew and Arabic for instance). So, here are my (so far) favorite combination fonts for easily mixing Thai and English in the same document: Free Serif (Serif) Gentium Basic (Serif) xxx Gentium Book (Serif) xxx Norasi (Serif) Kinnari (Serif) Linux Libertine (developed for Linux, but works in Win) Linux Biolinium (ditto) Sawasdee (go figure...) (light Sans Serif) Droid Sans Thai (Sans Serif) Garuda (Sans Serif) Loma (Sans Serif) Umpush (Sans Serif) Waree (Sans Serif) Purisa (informal handwriting style) Tlwg Typist (mono typewriter) Obviously if there are others who use both Thai and English, I'd be interested in any of your favorite fonts. As for moving your document to other machines, Libre Office now has the ability in some versions to embed the fonts in the document file itself, but I'm not sure if all versions and all platforms can utilize the embedded fonts yet. (can anyone help here???) I hope this helps you in your search. -- Frank
Many thanks for your reply. At last someone who knows what he's talking about. I don't have all those fonts available, but I do have some and I can now save documents and reopen them intact. I certainly do appreciate this information.
-- Dale Erwin Jr. 28 de Julio 657, Depto. 03 Magdalena del Mar, Lima 17 PERU http://leather.casaerwin.org -- 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/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
