Transliteration (transcription) Fonts

[nowhereman]

Hello everyone !

Can anyone help me in search of transliteration(transcription) fonts like those in the Benjawan Poomsan Becker's text boks.

I would be happy to get any hint.

Thanks in advance.

[Artamus]

Hello everyone !

Can anyone help me in search of transliteration(transcription) fonts like those in the Benjawan Poomsan Becker's text boks.

I would be happy to get any hint.

Thanks in advance.

There's probably several ways of going about this, and no doubt some are more elegant than others.

Although I've thought about the same question myself I've never gotten around to having a good look into it.

However, you posting made me have a dig into MS-Word.

In MS-Word if you do an <insert><symbol> from the pulldown you can have a browse through a lot of characters which would seem, on the surface, to be one solution. A quick hunt finds several of these special characters.

Solution might depend on how much typing you want to do. Insoerting or cut/paste character by character is not a route for lengthy texts.

[Tod Daniels]

While this may sound off-topic;

You may think investing time into learning to read and now evidently type "karaoke thai" can help you initially. However, I would suggest learning to actually read thai characters as a far more time effective endeavor.

Here's a Breaking News Bulletin: NOTHING ANYWHERE in thailand is written in karaoke thai, nor can most thais make heads or tails out anything written in it AT ALL. It was developed as a study aid to facilitate foreigners to start speaking thai faster by bypassing the time it takes learning to read thai script ONLY.

Anyway, good luck, any time spent studying cannot be discounted as a complete waste of time if you're learning something.

[Artamus]

While this may sound off-topic;

You may think investing time into learning to read and now evidently type "karaoke thai" can help you initially. However, I would suggest learning to actually read thai characters as a far more time effective endeavor.

Here's a Breaking News Bulletin: NOTHING ANYWHERE in thailand is written in karaoke thai, nor can most thais make heads or tails out anything written in it AT ALL. It was developed as a study aid to facilitate foreigners to start speaking thai faster by bypassing the time it takes learning to read thai script ONLY.

Anyway, good luck, any time spent studying cannot be discounted as a complete waste of time if you're learning something.

I agree that learning the Thai script is the best way to go.

However, if you are trying to communicate with someone unable to read Thai it definitely helps to have a tranliteration system.

[nowhereman]

Hello everyone !

Can anyone help me in search of transliteration(transcription) fonts like those in the Benjawan Poomsan Becker's text boks.

I would be happy to get any hint.

Thanks in advance.

There's probably several ways of going about this, and no doubt some are more elegant than others.

Although I've thought about the same question myself I've never gotten around to having a good look into it.

However, you posting made me have a dig into MS-Word.

In MS-Word if you do an <insert><symbol> from the pulldown you can have a browse through a lot of characters which would seem, on the surface, to be one solution. A quick hunt finds several of these special characters.

Solution might depend on how much typing you want to do. Insoerting or cut/paste character by character is not a route for lengthy texts.

Hi Artamus. Thank you for reply. I did dig in to MS-Word before posting this tread.

I even wrote and partially translated a book. Using inserting symbols, not by copying or pasting, I use the keyboard shortcut. That can be assigned from the symbols window. True that is a hard work because besides writing the text including special characters for some vowels and consonants I had to write one more extra row above the text , just for the tone marks. For better illustration you can see my web site http://www.thailio.890m.com, true it is in Slovenian language, but you can find the example by clicking on "Lekcija 1".

So I was wondering if anyone on Thaivisa has fonts as the ones in Benjawan Poomsan's books. That would make my work a lot easier.

I also got an idea to make fonts by my self. Using some Font Editor. But font editor programs can get pretty expensive. I even downloaded such a program, (pirate) and got a virus that smashed my computer. So from now on I am a bit more careful.

Thank you again for your reply and forgive me if there are mistakes in my writing since I am not a native English speaker. Any further idea would be more than welcome.

[nowhereman]

While this may sound off-topic;

You may think investing time into learning to read and now evidently type "karaoke thai" can help you initially. However, I would suggest learning to actually read thai characters as a far more time effective endeavor.

Here's a Breaking News Bulletin: NOTHING ANYWHERE in thailand is written in karaoke thai, nor can most thais make heads or tails out anything written in it AT ALL. It was developed as a study aid to facilitate foreigners to start speaking thai faster by bypassing the time it takes learning to read thai script ONLY.

Anyway, good luck, any time spent studying cannot be discounted as a complete waste of time if you're learning something.

Hi Tod-Daniels. Thank you for replying my post.

Nothing is off-topic, I am glad to get any respond.

I do speak, read and write quite some Thai now, true I am not an expert.

I agree with your opinion that is worth to learn reading and writing the language if a person lives in this country for a longer period.

I started with Karaoki Thai first, and as I continued to learn there was no other way but start with Thai alphabet, and I am happy I did it.

The reason I am looking for such fonts is that I am in a process of writing a text book for very beginners or travelers that do not have a need to make such an effort and study Thai alphabet. And the transcription is not for English speaking population.

So I had to adjust (romanization) transliteration for Slovenian language which is in a group of Slavic languages.

I believe I did a good job with transliteration and not to be modest about it, it is certainly more adequate for Slovenian language than the major two transliteration method standards made for English language ISO 11940 and The Royal Thai General System of Transcription.

Both of them have quite big imperfections, but that could be another topic.

And please forgive me if my initial topic was two short and unclear.

Thanks again for sharing opinion.

[AyG]

What you're really looking for is an IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) font. There are lots of them available for free on the web. Just Google for "IPA fonts" and choose a font you like the look of. Alternatively, just search for "Doulos SIL" which is a quite good looking font.

[Rikker]

I've had to do some large-volume typing in IPA. My font of choice is the free font CharisSIL. My favorite character map is BabelMap. Google them.

The easiest input I've found is Microsoft Word, using a combination of macros and auto-correct. For example, when I need to type IPA I create simple macros to produce the Unicode characters I need, and then assign those macros to keyboard shortcuts, so that, say, alt+e gives 'open e', alt+o gives 'open o', alt+n gives 'eng', etc. And then I use auto-correct for diacritics, so that double period .. adds a dot below, shift+double period (i.e. >>) adds a dot above, ` adds grave accent, shift+` adds acute accent, etc.

Stuff like that.

The basic macro code to insert a Unicode character is this:

Selection.TypeText Text:=ChrW(615)

Where the number in parentheses is the character's decimal number, which can be found using BabelMap.

Edited August 24, 2008 by Rikker

[nowhereman]

Thanks AyG for Doulos SIL fonts, they do look nice.

And as Rikker suggested I download Charis SIL fonts and Babel Map.

So I was quite busy last two days looking for the solution inspired by your suggestions.

They certainly widened my knowledge.

So I could get the basic vowels AEIOU with all 4 tone marks above: ÀÁÂÂ ÈÉÊĚ ÌÍÎÍ ÒÓÔǑ ÙÚÛǓ .( I hope they will show up in here).

But for extra vowels like:

เออะ >I use Ә

อึ >I use Ʉ

เอาะ >I use Ɔ

แอะ >I use Ɛ

They don't have the tone marks above.

So I think the only way to get all of them is by using some Font Editor program to make the missing characters and place them in to the character map positions for user fonts.

I hope all this characters will show on the forum correctly, if not….excuse me.

Any further suggestion more than welcome.

[Rikker]

This topic was covered in some detail two weeks ago. See this thread:

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Type-Special...ws-t204550.html

[nowhereman]

Thank you very much Rikker, I think I finally understand your explanation.

So if I want to write tone marks above characters, all I have to do is to use

Combining Diacritical Marks, that can be found in Unicode Block.

(hex. decimal values of marks that I use are 0300,0301,0302 and 030C ).

In my Microsoft Word I open symbol and make keyboard shortcuts for all four tone marks.

So I type them just the way as I would type tone marks in Thai writing.

First type the vowel and than tone mark with help of shortcuts that I made. So the tone marks appear above the vowel. Tone marks place great above Charis SIL and Doulous SIL, with other fonts this is not the case.

There is just one thing that doest work the way I imagined.

I had an intention to type in capital letters. The tone marks place perfectly above the Latin Capital characters, but not with capital Cyrillic and Latin Extended-B characters. Tone marks sink in to character as they are small characters.

So I gave up my intention to use capital letters. I will have to be satisfied with small letters instead.

Thanks again everyone for good suggestions and replays.

You guys helped me really a lot.

[Rikker]

Don't use the Cyrillic schwa. Schwa (both upper and lower case) is in the Latin Extended-B set, too. Unicode character 01DD is small schwa.

But yeah, marks above capital letters don't really work well unless they're precomposed.

[Richard W]

Don't use the Cyrillic schwa. Schwa (both upper and lower case) is in the Latin Extended-B set, too. Unicode character 01DD is small schwa.

But yeah, marks above capital letters don't really work well unless they're precomposed.

The trick is to choose a font that has both the capital letter and the combining mark in it.

[nowhereman]

Hi Richard W

If you mean Charis SIL and Doulos SIL fonts , they have only the basic vowels combined with tone marks above.

So there is still a problem with the extra vowel letters.They don''t have tone marks above. Or you had some other font in mind.

[nowhereman]

Thanks once again everyone for help and useful suggestions .

In case someone needs Doulous SIL font that work good with capital letters and characters for tone marks , just contact me.I did some changes, so now tone marks fit above capital letters perfectly.

[bmore99]

I gave up on typing the I.P.A. as used by Benjawan Poomsan Becker.

Now I just copy the thai text to www.thai2english.com and let the site do it for me (see preferences). Then copy the text back and with a recorded MS-Word macro get it into a Table.