Learning Thai Fonts

[Lithobid]

I am a lower intermediate thai speaker, and have been learning to read and write for about 3 months now. My reading is really begining to take off, although, I find it so hard to recognize different fonts. If the Thai is not in the traditional font, it is almost illegible to me. For those of you who are fluent, do you have any suggestions, hints or tips for studying. I know there are all the fonts listed on learningthai.com but I find that hard to use. What are the most popular fonts used in Thai media publishing, if you know perhaps I could take just those fonts from learningthai.com and add them to my daily studying routine.

Any help is appreciated, Thanks in advance

Lithobid.

[withnail]

My advice would be don't worry about it. Stick to a font you can easily read to start with and you'll find that once your reading and vocab of written words is at a level when you are able to read longer texts more naturally it becomes a lot easier to decript harder to read fonts when you see them. They are commonly found on signs and advertisements that you may have seen before in more standard fonts.

Here's a Thai font website http://www.f0nt.com/download/ which has a lot of these hard to read fonts. Why not try making a word document and copying and pasting words into it in different fonts. You'll also be able to make certain connections like an English S commonly being used as ร which will also help.

[Tod Daniels]

Here is an old post from the T/V forum which I found and has an excellent article in it by Doug Cooper called "How Do Thais Tell Letters Apart".

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=29663

It is mainly the trials and tribulations OCR software has with recognizing thai fonts. The article is an interesting read with many examples and ideas how the letters, tone marks, etc morphed into their various representations in different thai font styles.

(edited for a pesky spelling mistake)

Edited January 9, 2008 by tod-daniels