Thai Type Faces

[DavidHouston]

This weekend's Matichon Weekly contains an article by Michael Wright titled, "ปัญหาการออกแบบตัวพิมพ์ไทย" or "The Problem of Design of Thai Type Faces". The article is in Thai but it is very much worth reading. (If you wish to see a copy, let me know.)

In the article Mr. Wright argues, with some conviction, that one of the reasons that Thais, especially older Thais, do not read very much is that some printing techniques are too hard to read, even for native, educated speakers. Some type faces used in Thai printing, in particular, do not provide for enough visual clues as to what letters and vowels are represented. Readers must strain to read the letters. In the magazine or Pdf version he illustrates what he means.

My personal gripe is the font used in the books which accompany certain appliances. When a "ก" looks like an upside-down "U" and when you need a magnifying glass to see the differences between that and "ค", "ถ", and "ด", the font makers have gone too far. Finally, someone is standing up and saying so. Good for Mr. Wright!

Any thoughts?

[stateman]

This weekend's Matichon Weekly contains an article by Michael Wright titled, "ปัญหาการออกแบบตัวพิมพ์ไทย" or "The Problem of Design of Thai Type Faces". The article is in Thai but it is very much worth reading. (If you wish to see a copy, let me know.)

In the article Mr. Wright argues, with some conviction, that one of the reasons that Thais, especially older Thais, do not read very much is that some printing techniques are too hard to read, even for native, educated speakers. Some type faces used in Thai printing, in particular, do not provide for enough visual clues as to what letters and vowels are represented. Readers must strain to read the letters. In the magazine or Pdf version he illustrates what he means.

My personal gripe is the font used in the books which accompany certain appliances. When a "ก" looks like an upside-down "U" and when you need a magnifying glass to see the differences between that and "ค", "ถ", and "ด", the font makers have gone too far. Finally, someone is standing up and saying so. Good for Mr. Wright!

Any thoughts?

For a long time, I have made that complaint. Glad it is publicized.

Maybe in the future someone will pay attention to this when they design and select the type faces and fonts.

Given the wide choices available today, as more complaints are resonated, the media people should make a better selection.

BTW when reading and typing in Thai, my preference is MS Tahoma.

What do others prefer/use?

[meadish_sweetball]

Tahoma here as well.

[DavidHouston]

This weekend's Matichon Weekly contains an article by Michael Wright titled, "ปัญหาการออกแบบตัวพิมพ์ไทย" or "The Problem of Design of Thai Type Faces". The article is in Thai but it is very much worth reading. (If you wish to see a copy, let me know.)

In the article Mr. Wright argues, with some conviction, that one of the reasons that Thais, especially older Thais, do not read very much is that some printing techniques are too hard to read, even for native, educated speakers. Some type faces used in Thai printing, in particular, do not provide for enough visual clues as to what letters and vowels are represented. Readers must strain to read the letters. In the magazine or Pdf version he illustrates what he means.

My personal gripe is the font used in the books which accompany certain appliances. When a "ก" looks like an upside-down "U" and when you need a magnifying glass to see the differences between that and "ค", "ถ", and "ด", the font makers have gone too far. Finally, someone is standing up and saying so. Good for Mr. Wright!

Any thoughts?

For a long time, I have made that complaint. Glad it is publicized.

Maybe in the future someone will pay attention to this when they design and select the type faces and fonts.

Given the wide choices available today, as more complaints are resonated, the media people should make a better selection.

BTW when reading and typing in Thai, my preference is MS Tahoma.

What do others prefer/use?

I'm a Tahoma guy too. It is difficulty to tell what Thai fonts are being used because several roman fonts use the idential Thai font. For example, in my Word, Thahoma, Verdana, Ariel, and Times New Roman, all use the same Thai font. Angsana New and Cordia New, on the other hand, use the same font which is different than the set associated with Tahoma et al.

Edited December 21, 2007 by DavidHouston

[stateman]

I'm a Tahoma guy too. It is difficulty to tell what Thai fonts are being used because several roman fonts use the idential Thai font. For example, in my Word, Thahoma, Verdana, Ariel, and Times New Roman, all use the same Thai font. Angsana New and Cordia New, on the other hand, use the same font which is different than the set associated with Tahoma et al.

"Thahoma, Verdana, Ariel, and Times New Roman, all use the same Thai font."

I am surprised at that statement.

On my Word, Tahoma is distinguished from the others you mentioned.

When a text is in " Verdana, Ariel, or Times New Roman" it looks different and harder to read for me that I usually go through the trouble of highlighting the entire text and change the font to Tahoma.

[DavidHouston]

I'm a Tahoma guy too. It is difficulty to tell what Thai fonts are being used because several roman fonts use the idential Thai font. For example, in my Word, Thahoma, Verdana, Ariel, and Times New Roman, all use the same Thai font. Angsana New and Cordia New, on the other hand, use the same font which is different than the set associated with Tahoma et al.

"Thahoma, Verdana, Ariel, and Times New Roman, all use the same Thai font."

I am surprised at that statement.

On my Word, Tahoma is distinguished from the others you mentioned.

When a text is in " Verdana, Ariel, or Times New Roman" it looks different and harder to read for me that I usually go through the trouble of highlighting the entire text and change the font to Tahoma.

Perhaps it is just my computers; I would appreciate knowing how to better match up the Roman texts to their Thai counterparts. I have one XP machine and one Vista machine. Thanks.

[stateman]

I'm a Tahoma guy too. It is difficulty to tell what Thai fonts are being used because several roman fonts use the idential Thai font. For example, in my Word, Thahoma, Verdana, Ariel, and Times New Roman, all use the same Thai font. Angsana New and Cordia New, on the other hand, use the same font which is different than the set associated with Tahoma et al.

"Thahoma, Verdana, Ariel, and Times New Roman, all use the same Thai font."

I am surprised at that statement.

On my Word, Tahoma is distinguished from the others you mentioned.

When a text is in " Verdana, Ariel, or Times New Roman" it looks different and harder to read for me that I usually go through the trouble of highlighting the entire text and change the font to Tahoma.

Perhaps it is just my computers; I would appreciate knowing how to better match up the Roman texts to their Thai counterparts. I have one XP machine and one Vista machine. Thanks.

Not sure what you meant.

Cheers.

[Tywais]

Perhaps it is just my computers; I would appreciate knowing how to better match up the Roman texts to their Thai counterparts. I have one XP machine and one Vista machine. Thanks.

The issue is that Word (under XP) used dual metric fonts. That is, if you select Times Roman it associates (2nd metric) font for when switching to Thai. This is true under Office 2000/2003 but can't see those same font choices under 2007.

[DavidHouston]

I'm a Tahoma guy too. It is difficulty to tell what Thai fonts are being used because several roman fonts use the idential Thai font. For example, in my Word, Thahoma, Verdana, Ariel, and Times New Roman, all use the same Thai font. Angsana New and Cordia New, on the other hand, use the same font which is different than the set associated with Tahoma et al.

"Thahoma, Verdana, Ariel, and Times New Roman, all use the same Thai font."

I am surprised at that statement.

On my Word, Tahoma is distinguished from the others you mentioned.

When a text is in " Verdana, Ariel, or Times New Roman" it looks different and harder to read for me that I usually go through the trouble of highlighting the entire text and change the font to Tahoma.

Perhaps it is just my computers; I would appreciate knowing how to better match up the Roman texts to their Thai counterparts. I have one XP machine and one Vista machine. Thanks.

Not sure what you meant.

Cheers.

For example, open a Word document, right click anywhere on the document, and choose "fonts". Modern versions of Word show "Latin text" fonts and "Complex Script" fonts. If you are set up to show Thai, you can see about 20 Thai typfaces in the Complex script box. There are many more fonts in the Latin text area. Under "Prevew" you can see the effects of choosing both Latin and Complex scripts. Choose a Complex script font, like Tahoma, and look at the result in the preview box; then make changes to the Latin texts. Nothing changes in the Thai script.

A similar set of choices is available in Internet Explorer under Internet Options, Fonts. So, my question is, if one selects "Verdana", for example, for the Latin text, how is the Complex script for Thai affected since they are different choices. Thanks.

[Richard W]

A similar set of choices is available in Internet Explorer under Internet Options, Fonts. So, my question is, if one selects "Verdana", for example, for the Latin text, how is the Complex script for Thai affected since they are different choices. Thanks.

Ask not how your Latin selection affects Thai, but how your Thai selection affects Latin!

I investigated options for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 1.5.0.6 with no langage set.

Encoding: implicitly UTF-16:

Latin: Displayed in default for Latin.

Thai: Displayed in default for Thai.

(The Thai characters were encoded in UTF-16)

Encoding: ASCII (no explicit encoding. The Thai characters were encoded as character entities.)

Encoding set (in browser, not in file) to Western European:

Latin: Displayed in default for Latin.

Thai: Displayed in default for Thai.

Encoding set (in browser, not in file) to Thai, whether explicitly or autodetected as such:

Latin: Displayed in default for Thai.

Thai: Displayed in default for Thai.

Interestingly, Firefox 1.5.0.6 auto-detected the encoding as Western ISO-8859-1, while IE7 auto-detected the encoding as Thai (Window CP 874, nearly the same as TIS-620). Neither is wrong, though one could argue that having Thai characters encoded as character entities was evidence that the coding was not Thai but that there was text in the Thai language.

Encoding: Explicitly ISO-98859-1 ('Latin-1'), but no non-ASCII characters in the file.

Latin: Displayed in default for Latin.

Thai: Displayed in default for Thai.

(The Thai characters were encoded as character entities.)

Encoding: TIS-620 (Thai national standard plus non-breaking space)

Latin: Displayed in default for Thai.

Thai: Displayed in default for Thai.

(The Thai characters were encoded using TIS-620.)

I haven't investigated the effects of HTML language settings. I strongly suspect that neither browser will properly understand a declaration that the text is in Sanskrit or Pali. Browsers traditionally deduce the language from the encoding. One complication to this approach is that the Thai encoding does a reasonable job of encoding English, as it includes the whole of ASCII.

[Jay_Jay]

A big part of my job is producing documents / reports / manuals in Thai, English and other languages every day. The base font I ask all my team to work with is MS Arial Unicode, as it seems to be one of the only fonts that is genuinely in proportion to the Latin and other fonts. Most of the Thai default fonts like Angsana etc are around 30% smaller than the Latin. You can always go into the styles and adjust the complex font in the normal template to 30% bigger than the Latin font, but then that ruins your line spacing if you have some lines with all Thai or English text, then some other lines with a mixture.

In saying this, the type-face of the Thai Arial isn't the most aesthetically pleasing compared to something like Eucrosial, but it saves hours of re-formatting at the end of a job.

[DavidHouston]

A big part of my job is producing documents / reports / manuals in Thai, English and other languages every day. The base font I ask all my team to work with is MS Arial Unicode, as it seems to be one of the only fonts that is genuinely in proportion to the Latin and other fonts. Most of the Thai default fonts like Angsana etc are around 30% smaller than the Latin. You can always go into the styles and adjust the complex font in the normal template to 30% bigger than the Latin font, but then that ruins your line spacing if you have some lines with all Thai or English text, then some other lines with a mixture.

In saying this, the type-face of the Thai Arial isn't the most aesthetically pleasing compared to something like Eucrosial, but it saves hours of re-formatting at the end of a job.

Jay-Jay, you are wonderful. As I mentioned in the PM I have been having problems printing Word documents which use a Thai font. Most of these used a Tahoma or Verdana font. It's hard to describe what the problem is except to say that the Thai vowels and diacritical marks which fall over a consonant tend to be displaced to the the right of the consonant. Where the vowels should be, the document seems to impose circles overlying the consonants. The results are difficult to read.

I just tried to print a Thai paragraph two ways, one with Tahoma as the Latin and complex script and a second time with MS Arial Unicode. Lo and behold!, the second time printed the document perfectly, without displacement or the epicircles. Bravo and thanks!

Now, how do I fix vertical compression where by the vowel on top of the consonant and the tone mark do not become compressed into each other?

[Richard W]

A big part of my job is producing documents / reports / manuals in Thai, English and other languages every day. The base font I ask all my team to work with is MS Arial Unicode, as it seems to be one of the only fonts that is genuinely in proportion to the Latin and other fonts. Most of the Thai default fonts like Angsana etc are around 30% smaller than the Latin. You can always go into the styles and adjust the complex font in the normal template to 30% bigger than the Latin font, but then that ruins your line spacing if you have some lines with all Thai or English text, then some other lines with a mixture.

In saying this, the type-face of the Thai Arial isn't the most aesthetically pleasing compared to something like Eucrosial, but it saves hours of re-formatting at the end of a job.

Jay-Jay, you are wonderful. As I mentioned in the PM I have been having problems printing Word documents which use a Thai font. Most of these used a Tahoma or Verdana font. It's hard to describe what the problem is except to say that the Thai vowels and diacritical marks which fall over a consonant tend to be displaced to the the right of the consonant. Where the vowels should be, the document seems to impose circles overlying the consonants. The results are difficult to read.

What versions are you using? I have no such problems with Word 2002 (Thai version), Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Tahoma Version 3.14 Copyrighted 2004 (plain font file size 383,140 bytes). Do you have complex scripts enabled? This might cause problems with subscript and superscript marks in the wrong order.

I just tried to print a Thai paragraph two ways, one with Tahoma as the Latin and complex script and a second time with MS Arial Unicode. Lo and behold!, the second time printed the document perfectly, without displacement or the epicircles. Bravo and thanks!

Now, how do I fix vertical compression where by the vowel on top of the consonant and the tone mark do not become compressed into each other?

There is a problem here. The spacing between lines is normally a function of the font 'size'. The minimum spacing appropriate for a font containing only unaccented Roman script characters is different to one containing Thai characters with the same 'x-height'. Some applications increase the vertical space allocated to a line according to its contents, which is what happens with mixed-font lines, but this is unusual. Jay_Jay would say that this ruins one's line spacing. Another solution is to allow lines to overlap, but the Windows solutions seems to be to clip the offending glyphs. For instance, I note that with the Angsana New font, the bottom of the sara uu is clipped in the cluster do chada sara uu (ฎู).

Tahoma solves this problems by making the superscript marks very shallow, and similarly the tail of do chada and to patak.

As far as I am aware, the discontinued Arial Unicode MS font does not have any provision for the stacking of non-spacing combining marks. A great many fonts don't.