Sharing Word Docs With Thai Script Crossplatform...

[desi]

For those of you who share word docs with Thai script, what is your font of choice?

Also, is there a quick way to change Thai scattered around a document?

(I'm not a MS Word person at all)

[Rikker]

The most common Thai fonts (in my experience) are Angsana, Cordia, Tahoma, and Browallia (not necessarily in that order). Windows comes with all of them, I believe, and I think Mac comes with versions of some of them. Will have to ask other Mac people about that.

As for changing formatting for just Thai stuff, it's pretty easy, especially if the Thai is in a different font from the rest of the document. Here's a step-by-step I wrote for someone who asked me a similar question (an older professor, so apologies if it's over-simplified):

First, in "Find and Replace", make sure the button "More" is clicked, to show advanced options.

1. Click in the "Find what" field so the cursor is blinking there, but don't type anything.

2. Click Format, then Font. Type the name of the font you want to change, but don't change any other settings.

3. Click OK. It should now say "Font: Tahoma" (or whatever font you chose) directly underneath the "Find what" field.

4. Now click in to the "Replace with" field, and once again click the Format button, then choose Font.

5. This time, select the desired new font.

6. Then click OK. It should now read "Font: Angsana" (or whatever font you chose) directly under the "Replace with" field.

In theory, you can now just click "Replace All" and it will convert every instance of that font (and only that font) to the new font. However, I usually click "Find Next" manually a few times just to make sure it appears to be finding what I intended, and then I'll go ahead and click Replace All.

You can also do this change size, color, or any other aspect of formatting.

I'm a Word guy by necessity. It has some maddening bugs, but overall it's very useful and flexible, and way smarter with Thai than OpenOffice.org (especially if you have Thai proofing tools installed in Word). I even program simple macros for Word, but I'm sure to always scrub myself thoroughly after coming into contact with Visual Basic. Heh.

[desi]

Wow. Thank you Rikker. I used Angsana so it should work (but I'll save your instructions just in case someone yells at me).

I have a heavy dislike for Excel, Word, most anything put out by Microsoft as some of their quirks drive me crazy. Like what happened today, where I wasted hours trying to find a solution to several problems. I did come up with one way, but while it works on my document, in Word there is no guarantee it'll work for someone else.

To change the Thai script: click your mouse anywhere inside the Thai >> in the formatting palette click ‘select all’ >> then select your font of choice.

This method does not select all of that font if any has a different colour or slightly different style to it.

Again, thanks!

[RickBradford]

I use the easily available Courier Mono Thai, because it seems to scale nicely to big font sizes which make it easy for a relative novice to read, and it formats nicely, even with challenging words like ครั้ง.

[meadish_sweetball]

Does anybody know if there is an open source font resembling Angsana or Cordia with good scaling capabilities available?

[Tywais]

Does anybody know if there is an open source font resembling Angsana or Cordia with good scaling capabilities available?

linux.thai.net scalable fonts. Here is the direct link to the ftp directory > thai-ttf. ttf is truetype fonts which uses internal metrics similar to postscript to define the character, thus no scaling limits to speak of. The Kinnari.ttf font in the thai-ttf-0.4.9.tar.gz file looks very similar to the Angsana.

If you are not sure how to extract the .tar.gz file under windows just let me know.

//edit - will add the program that can extract them > 7-zip or if you already have WinRar, it can do it also.

[desi]

Thanks everyone. In the end, I created a pdf file. I'm not a fan of pdf's but I was advised that the macros in Word could be responsible for passing on a virus. And while my files would (obviously) not have them, I shouldn't be putting myself into the position of possible blame. And since the files are offered on my site for download... sigh... what a pain that was...