Lanna fonts --unicode

Bhante Dhammanando,

  All the Lanna fonts I know of are non-Unicode --I have seen several Lanna
fonts produced by Thai academia, and while some look good, they will tend to
have difficult input, and zero "interoperability" (in other words: the
person you send the document to has to have exactly the same font and
technical setup to read the same document that you created...).

  Unicode Lanna is not far down the road: Ka'onohi Kai (of the website I keep
linking to: www.xenotypetech.com) has created a Lanna font in the distant
past (i.e., pre-Unicode) and has proposed adapting it to become a unicode
font in the near future.

  The one big caveat here is that Lanna "doesn't exist" on the Unicode plane
  --which means that Ka'onohi will have to "map" the font onto the Burmese
language range.  This isn't fundamentally "a bad thing", but it does mean
that (1) with a unicode font created in this way, you could create .PDF
files that would look identical on any computer, but (2) if you created a
Lanna .TXT file, and sent it to someone who only had a Burmese font (but no
Unicode Lanna) it would show up as Pali-in-Burmese-script (still legible ...
if you can read Burmese script).

  It may be 5 years or more before Lanna "officially exists" on the Unicode
plane, so this kind of half-way measure (i.e., creating Lanna as a font
layer on top of Burmese or Cambodian) will be the best possible for some
time --same goes for Unicode Lao Dhamma.

  In any case, I will let the list know if there are any new developments in
this regard.

E.M.


--
A saying of the Buddha from http://metta.lk/
Get your Dhamma Books from http://books.metta.lk/
He who is stained (with defilements) without self-control and truthfulness,
is not worthy of wearing the yellow robes.
Random Dhammapada Verse 9