From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Mon Jul 09 2007 - 11:23:03 CDT
> The problem of using any x or cross is that the vowels will not attach to
> it.
Which is a shaping engine issue, not an encoding issue per se. The shaping engine needs to
know what is expected for Lao text, and as in the case with other scripts and languages
the specialist needs of things like dictionary publication may be overlooked. So Philippe
is right in suggesting that the first thing that needs to be done is to determine what
character this X should be, and then to approach the makers of Lao shaping engines, e.g.
the Microsoft team responsible for the Uniscribe engine, and request that this character
be recognised by the Lao engine as a legitimate base for marks.
A quicker, dirtier approach would be to make a specialist font in which the X-like glyph
was encoded as U+2C55, i.e. the dotted circle character used by Unicode convention and by
shaping engines as a base for combining marks. I wouldn't want to see such fonts at loose
in the wild, as it were, but it would be a reasonable mechanism for private use in a
specialist publication.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com We say our understanding measures how things are, and likewise our perception, since that is how we find our way around, but in fact these do not measure. They are measured. -- Aristotle, Metaphysics
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