Danny's Weblog
This section is for articles which relate mainly to the Cambodian language, often referred to as Khmer. As with the rest of my site, the articles are presented in *reverse* chronological order. Also, they tend to represent things which I have discovered or speculated about which *supplement* the standard materials: this is not intended to present a free teach-yourself-Khmer course.
In particular, note that I originally focused on using the "Limon-type" fonts for Cambodian, as they were far more commonly used than Unicode. Although I believe Limon is still much more common, support for Unicode is so much better these days that more recent posts focus on Unicode. To get a balanced picture, you should read the entire folder.
You may also be interested in articles which refer to Asian languages in general: Asia/Language-misc
My new font for Khmer phonetics: "PKD"
I have created a new font, based on a public-domain font, which contains the phonetic characters you need to represent Khmer as used in Huffman's books. I've named it "PKD" – phonetic Khmer Danny.
I had tried to use existing phonetic fonts, but they were very hard to use. My font is easy, because you access the funky characters with nothing more than the shift key – it's not like Limon, where you also need to install a special keyboard handler, and the non-ASCII characters get mangled by most programs: with PKD, programs just see the phonetic characters as upper-case ASCII characters, so any existing editor can be used. (Limon has to use umpteen characters to represent the enormous Khmer character set; my font only needs to identify the *sounds*, which are far fewer.)
If you don't have my font enabled, a sample of text will look something like this:
kNOm jOG tIv bAntup tIk
which will not be mangled by anything – unlike the "1/2" signs, degree signs and whatnot that you get from Limon. (Can anyone guess what the above sentence means?)
When you do install my font and set that string of characters to use it, it'll show the right phonetics (assuming I gave the correct pronunciation myself).
It's a free download, about 35 kB. I hope a lot of people start using it.
[http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/nolist/pkd/]
Incidentally, it also contains English phonetics and Thai tone marks.
Copyright © 2003-2010 Alternate Worlds Publishing, Boston MA USA
The Little Trouble Girl font is copyright Blue Vinyl Fonts vendorurl: www.bvfonts.com
