> I have been thinking about this recently. Is there a font that
> comprises Thai, Sinhala, Burmese, Khmer and Laos scripts (all in
> one)? If not, is there an aspiring font designer willing to undertake
> the task (now that it is possible to put them all in a single, but
> huge, file, with standard presentation)? Or shall we (again) install
> different fonts for different scripts?
The beauty of Unicode is that we don't have to worry about the font
side of things - as long as individual users have a font installed
that covers the range of glyphs they wish to view then there's
nothing to worry about. I believe that most systems these days
have at least Thai Unicode fonts installed by default.
(Sinhalese and Lao I'm unsure about, but Burmese, Khmer and Lao scripts
are perhaps still quite rare. At least, none of them seem to be
available as input options in my copy of (Chinese) Windows XP Pro.)
In short: Unicode is a great, hassle-saving change from the
'custom font' days of old where to type in many SEA scripts one had
to get a special font with its own custom encoding, and viewers had
to have the font installed in order to see anything meaningful at all.
Anyway, I'm sure there are Unicode fonts available for all of those
scripts, see for example the Pali Rosetta Stone my friend Eisel
Mazard has done and saved to PDF:
http://pratyeka.org/pali/PaliRosettaStone.pdf
- Walter, who is possibly flying to Thailand this afternoon and will
thus be offline for a couple of days.
NB: The link above is from a new page called 'Resources for
Learning Pali (with special reference to Sinhalese, Burmese,
and Muul-Khmer script)' @
http://pratyeka.org/pali/
Other documents on that page:
- Loka Sutta excerpt in Khmer, Sinhalese + Burmese
- Avyaya & Upasagga
- Pali Grammatical Terms
There is also a link to a new, corrected edition of Narada
Thera's Pali textbook (also done by Eisel) at
http://pratyeka.org/narada/