Typing In Thai?

[nephilim]

Hi All,

I recently bought a PC which was installed with American / English WinXPhome. The keyboard has Thai characters on it (as well as english). Thing is, I'd like to get some Thai typing done but am not sure how to do it.

So far I have managed to only produce thai characters in Arial Unicode, by swapping keyboard languages in control panel. Even then, the thai only appears in Adobe Illustrator and MS Word.

If I install a "thai font", it just produces western characters.

I'm at a loss. i'd like to be able to type in thai, in any chosen application and use a wide variety of thai fonts.

Can anyone help me out?

thanks

Neph.

[meadish_sweetball]

As far as I know you cannot expect each and every application in a non Thai system to work with Thai text, unfortunately - many developers probably never even think of this compatibility.

What programs were you thinking of specifically? Cut and paste works fine in many instances.

I can type Thai in the Microsoft applications I use such as MSN Messenger, MS Word and IE - I can also get Thai in Photoshop. What applications are failing you, exactly?

[nephilim]

Hi

I need to use illustrator and photoshop, specifically. Quark 6.0 would be nice as well. The main problem I have is that any "thai" font I install does not show as Thai on screen. The only font that will produce thai is arial unicode.

My need is to use a number of different fonts, in thai.

thanks

neph.

[lopburi3]

Fonts ending with "UPC" should work.

[sas_cars]

windowsxp has built in support for virtually any language in the world.You gotta go and check the settings from Control Panel in sub category Regional and Language Options.

[Richard W]

Some applications seem not to understand Unicode input (would UPC mean Unicode PC?). For example, although I can happily use Thai from a Thai keyboard in the basic Windows XP programs (notepad, Outlook Express), and cutting and pasting it in works well enough for Word, Unicode fonts don't work with StarOffice 5.2.

For example, I can do Thai (Kedmanee) input for StarOffice 5.2, but I am restricted to 8-bit fonts, such as DB Thai. When I do that, DB Thai works well enough, but I can't cut and paste Thai from notepad to StarOffice 5.2 on Windows XP.

[lopburi3]

Some applications seem not to understand Unicode input (would UPC mean Unicode PC?). For example, although I can happily use Thai from a Thai keyboard in the basic Windows XP programs (notepad, Outlook Express), and cutting and pasting it in works well enough for Word, Unicode fonts don't work with StarOffice 5.2.

For example, I can do Thai (Kedmanee) input for StarOffice 5.2, but I am restricted to 8-bit fonts, such as DB Thai. When I do that, DB Thai works well enough, but I can't cut and paste Thai from notepad to StarOffice 5.2 on Windows XP.

I have open office 1.1 and no problem using any upc font inside it or to paste Thai from MS notepad to it.

Is 5.2 the newest version from Star? Maybe download the free Open Office?

[Richard W]

I have open office 1.1 and no problem using any upc font inside it or to paste Thai from MS notepad to it.

Is 5.2 the newest version from Star? Maybe download the free Open Office?

Star Office 5.2 is not the latest version; I think Thai support was included at Star Office 6.0. I gave Star Office 5.2 as an example of what can happen. At the moment the Thai edition of MS Office 2002 serves me well enough, though perhaps I should consider Open Office for my Linux system.

[Richard W]

Hi All,

I recently bought a PC which was installed with American / English WinXPhome. The keyboard has Thai characters on it (as well as english). Thing is, I'd like to get some Thai typing done but am not sure how to do it.

So far I have managed to only produce thai characters in Arial Unicode, by swapping keyboard languages in control panel. Even then, the thai only appears in Adobe Illustrator and MS Word.

If I install a "thai font", it just produces western characters.

I'm at a loss. i'd like to be able to type in thai, in any chosen application and use a wide variety of thai fonts.

Can anyone help me out?

thanks

Neph.

I'm intrigued by the problem. Have you now got other fonts to work with applications that produce Thai with Arial Unicode? Tahoma is one font that should work.

For the applications that aren't working, are you getting a consistent replacement by Western characters? One weird conversion that can occur when using the Kedmanee keyboard is:

• Striking 'g' (for เ Unicode U+0E40) yields @ (Unicode U+0040)
  
• Striking 'i' (for ร Unicode U+0E23) yields # (Unicode U+0023)
  
• Striking 'y' (for the vowel of อั Unicode U+0E31) yields (Unicode U+0031)
  

In this case the Unicode encoding is being generated but the high byte is being lost.

A more typical conversion, which I get with (superseded) Star Office 5.2, is:

• Striking 'g' (for เ Unicode U+0E40) yields à (a grave, Unicode U+00E0)
  
• Striking 'i' (for ร Unicode U+0E23) yields à (A tilde Unicode U+00C3)
  
• Striking 'y' (for the vowel of อั Unicode U+0E31) yields Ñ (N tilde Unicode U+00D1)
  

In this case the application is using the raw TIS-620 codes (Unicode minus 0D60) or a similar 'codepage'. In the this case, DB Thai is one Thai font you can use, and there ought to be other 'legacy' fonts out there.

There are also strange ('stone-age') fonts where you type Thai as though you were using a Kedmanee keyboard, but with the system thinking you are using an English keyboard.

In either case, it ought to be possible to convert Unicode fonts to work with these miscodings, but my attempts to do this sort of thing six years ago failed completely. Does anyone know of tools to do this sort of modification? Nasty complications may arise with the interactions of sara i-type vowels with tonemarks and the 'tails' of ป ฝ ฟ (po pla, fo fa, and fo fan).

[nephilim]

Hi Richard W,

To answer you, yes, Tahoma works but produces identical looking characters to Airial Unicode.

Yes I do get consistent character replacements with other fonts.

I still cant get "thai" fonts to show in anything. Even in a font browsers utility, they are western. I'm obviously missing something

Neph.

[lopburi3]

You say you switch language in control panel? You should have an icon at right bottom of screen with EN that can be changed to TH for language change. Look up language bar in help if not there.

In control panel you should have under regional and languages settings/languages/install fonts for complex scripts (including Thai) checked and under advanced the 10021 THAI as well as many others should be checked.

[Richard W]

To answer you, yes, Tahoma works but produces identical looking characters to Airial Unicode.

Yes I do get consistent character replacements with other fonts.

I still cant get "thai" fonts to show in anything. Even in a font browsers utility, they are western. I'm obviously missing something

Neph.

You don't mean that literally, do you? Compared to Arial, Tahoma is rounded (e.g. ง ngo ngu), the characters are bigger for the same size, and, in the version I have, the bowl of tho than is much wider with a subscript vowel, e.g. ฐู.

Yes I do get consistent character replacements with other fonts.

Which pattern do they follow?

[jhj2000]

lopbur3 is right, go to control panel and select "date time lang ...". In the dialog box select Languages and tick the install complex scripts box. Click the details button on the same dialog it will allow you to add Thai to your system.

To use Thai open the application that you want to use, click on the keyboard option, either in the bottom right hand corner of the desktop or sometimes a bar at the top of the screen and select Thai. You will find the font sizes are very small but just increase the size.

[Richard W]

Nephilim, what progress have you made? My feeling is that you (or someone else for you) had already done what Lopburi3 recommended and that the problem is as Meadish suggests. If LilyUPC gives your Thai a strikingly different appearance in Word, I would be sure that Windows XP on your machine was supporting Thai as well as it can. Knowing what the conversion from Thai to Western characters is would also help a lot.

If the problem is as Meadish suggests, an answer would be to use a font editor to change the character to glyph mapping ('cmap'), which I believe one could do with a font editor such as the ttf_edit from http://www.truetex.com. (This answer does seem rather like using Word to change one letter in a text file.) Of course, having thus created your own font, you would have to embed the fonts (or otherwise eliminate a dependency on them) before sharing the outputs electronically. I think Star Office 5.2 (my only non-DOS-based Thai-incompetent program on Windows) does something like this on the fly.

There may well be a simpler answer around, but I haven't managed to guess the appropriate search keywords for Google.

[nephilim]

Hi

As for progress, well, I got halfway and have a workable solution. I have found a certainset of fonts - they all start with DSA{name} and they work fine in Illustrator (what I need them in), so that will do for now.

Thanks for everyones help, much appriciated

cheers

Neph.