Danny's Weblog

Yet more info on using Khmer fonts

The following link is interesting, but I could not find one of the links on the page which led to the keyboard layout which seems to be actually *used* in PP.

www.angkor.com [http://www.angkor.com/fonts.shtml]

The layout I mean has the following characters available from the figure one key:

Unshifted: Khmer figure one

Shifted: Arabic (Western) figure one

Ctrl-alt: Exclamation point

Ctrl-alt-shift: Funny character like Khmer "r" with a bar through it (I just asked somebody and it means "riel", the Cambodian currency).

Incidentally, that link above mentions something about "zero-space fonts". The concept seems to be that by manually embedding non-printing characters between the characters of printable words, applications can automagically handle line breaks at the ends of words. I had certainly wondered before how this is administered, in English as much as Khmer. My impression is that there must be a flag on every character in a Truetype font which tells an application whether a character is an in-word character or a word separator character, but every time I tried to understand available info on Truetype fonts my head went round and round.

In the link you need to download some sort of special stuff, but actually I did notice when I was going through the table of alt-codes that alt-0173 puzzlingly did absolutely nothing. Maybe it's actually an intentional "zero-space" character. Hmmm. I just tried it, and alt-0173 has an interesting effect: it is indeed normally invisible, but if Wordpad needs to break a long "word" it indeed will prefer to break at an alt-0173 character. However, when it does so, it puts a hyphen at the end of the line, which seems suboptimal although still useful.

I just checked with somebody again (long-suffering chap) and although he had forgotten about the feature when I started to explain it, when I showed him how it worked he said he did remember it being mentioned in his computer classes, but apparently people don't actually use it. Wow. He said that people often put actual spaces between words when entering text on a computer, or alternatively are used to seeing line breaks inside words.

I just checked the Cambodian government page where you can download the Limon fonts. Here's a link to the page in Cambodian: www.cambodia.gov.kh [http://www.cambodia.gov.kh/unisql2/egov/khmer/home.view.html]

Of course, you need to have the Limon fonts installed already to get much out of this...

It's a little hard to see this on the original page, but if you cut and paste the text into Wordpad and of course set the selection to a Limon font at 36 pt, you can see a large number of (ordinary) spaces between the words. I can't read Khmer well enough to be sure, but it certainly seems to support what I'd been told.

I think I should try asking the same question at a print/design shop too. They probably put more effort into typographical issues.

Incidentally, I just discovered that alt-0160 is a non-breaking space, though that doesn't help problems in Khmer much.

Here is a link to a site which offers the "zero-space" system, as well as an interesting utility to convert Word documents using one font system into another: www.forum.org.kh [http://www.forum.org.kh/eng/download.htm]

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