Lao Fonts

Why this page?

I'm learning to read Lao, the language spoken in Laos, South East Asia.

I'm approaching this from a somewhat obtuse angle. I'm a software developer familiar with the Microsoft platform, and have been using Unicode for many years.

There are documents written in Lao on the web that do not use Unicode, but other proprietary encoding. I want to learn the Lao, but cannot copy and paste Lao text I've found into dictionaries.

Now there's a way to convert text from these different font coding conventions to Unicode.

Transcoding Tools

I have written 3 web hosted transcoding tools: they perform character translation between various custom fonts and Unicode, and from Unicode back.

Alo <=> Unicode

Alo <=> Saysettha 2000  

Saysettha 2000 <==> Unicode

Instructions

Instructions on setting up and using the transcoding tools are here.

Big Brother Mouse

Do you remember the excitement of rushing home to read the next chapter in a book that you hoped would never end?

Many Lao children have no such memories, because they've never seen a book that was fun or exciting to read. Some have shared textbooks; others have never seen a book at all.

Big Brother Mouse is a Lao-based, Lao-owned project that publish "books that make literacy fun!"

Several of their books are published on-line. They're especially useful as they have English text alongside Lao. Their Alo font system is described here.

I hope you'll visit them and find out more. (And I'm not just talking about hyperlinks and fonts!)

Ishida's Lao character picker

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shape
transcript
font grid

Links

TrueType Hinting

The Socio-economic ATLAS of the Lao PDR is an interesting read. It uses the Saysettha 2000 font.

Big Brother Mouse has several PDF files of books using the Alo font. 

KPL news publish stories in Unicode, complete with zero width space word breaks.
(I may not know what's being written - but I do know where the word breaks are!)

WAZU JAPAN's Gallery of Unicode Fonts

Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources - Lao

Standalone Version