Re: Lao ICT for development site and the FOSS Primer

Anousak,

You are right that ໍ່ should be two distinct unicodes when
serialized or persisted to storage. Compound tone mark should not be
represented as a single unicode. When I see ux0eb3 (sala am) in the Lao
unicode set I wonder if this is correctly created. I think that this is
not necessary. Also unnecessary are the ux0edc (ໜ)and 0edd ໝ which
is the same as ຫ and ນ, ຫ and ມ respectively. But when I see
sequence of the alphabets in the table I know immediately they screwed
up big time. If you look at English unicode table you see that ABC,
etc., lined up in sequence. If you are a programmer like I do you know
this make sense. If you write a sort or search function this is
valuable info.

For opentype fonts the opentype manager should behind the scene taking
care of the presentation. That is type manager for the underline OS
should taking care of the presentation for these characters and if the
fonts are designed correctly the glyphs should be viewed and printed
correctly. With opentype I don't think you need keyboard layout manager
at all. I think authors of many Lao font created compounded tonal marks
or vowels because they want the glyphs to look nice and aligned, which
is nothing wrong. An example ໍ່above would be overlaped or
offsetted if it were two characters in truetype font. With opentype
font you can easily design glyphs that is displayed and printed nicely.
I believe that Linux also supports opentype fonts. So I say today
technology allows us to be more creative. The big problem we have to
overcome is to rearrange the lao alphabets in the unicode table so that
the sort, search can be optimized.
Earlier you mentioned about zero space character for word or line
break, I think other langauges also has this feature so it is a good
idea. There are lots of space left in the table, so many more special
characters can be added. One of them should be Lao kip character.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Unicode Word 2004 and Windows.
    ... > Actually, the Mac MS Unicode fonts are Times New Roman, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, ... Arial Unicode MS has all the characters of the ... I don't know how many characters Times New Roman, Verdana and Trebuchet MS ...
    (microsoft.public.mac.office.word)
  • Re: Extended Font Characters Garbled in BookMarks
    ... the fonts are set as "Latin based". ... fonts I've chosen are Unicode based, ... nonsensical characters or a blank space. ... Western, Latin, are very different from Unicode! ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.customize)
  • Re: Scripts
    ... or the availability of OpenType or other rendering devices (Peter Daniel's ... Unicode is a mapping from characters to code points which are natural ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: How do I create symbols in Word 2007?
    ... specifically how to combine characters to create a new one. ... Microsoft MVP (Word) ... be available in one of the full Unicode fonts such as Arial Unicode or ... symbol fonts. ...
    (microsoft.public.word.docmanagement)
  • Re: Unicode support in windows mobile 5
    ... You can also buy fonts, ... If you want to display unicode on your PPC, ... Generally English devices have English characters, ... I'm woking on a projects that uses unicode char. ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.compactframework)