🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi Jay & John & all you other very helpful people. Geoffrey here.
     We're still working on this Lao font problem. John, a Lao font creator, has tried a few things but his knowledge of PM is limited. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to get a font to work with PM. Here's his latest correspondence:

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I downloaded and installed a trial version of PM7

First, it is clear from a few tests that there appears to be no way to get PM to handle Lao Unicode fonts at all – I could not import a document or type Lao in if Unicode is used. That is not too surprising, since PM7 dates from several years ago, and very few programs were properly “Unicode-aware” at that time. Most programs that claimed to handle Unicode could only do so by using codepage conversion – but Lao (unlike Thai) has never had a supported codepage, so that cannot work.

So there isn’t much point trying to convert the text in PM to a Lao Unicode font, as it won’t work.

I looked at the macro facility, and it may be possible to create a macro (using an external application such as VB6) to manipulate text, but it would be a lot of work, and would not resolve the issue anyway.

However, I believe there is another way to tackle the problem, and am currently investigating it. If (as I think) the only problem with the PDF is the missing ‘naw nok’, then if I create a variant of Saysettha Lao with a duplicated ‘naw nok’ at a different code point, then the entire text can be changed to the new font, and search and replace used to replace the ‘naw nok’ characters by the new codepoint.

I have tried it in principle, and it seems to work, but as I am unfamiliar with PM I am not sure of an efficient way to process the entire document. (Again scripting could be used if one was familiar with it – I did quite a bit of scripting of InDesign, but the PM model is totally different, of course.)

The only difficulty I am having is that PM doesn’t like my modified font – it is fine in Word, etc, but for some reason PM can’t see the font. I expect that is just a matter of playing with one of the font header parameters, and will have another play with it tomorrow. I do have the source for the font, and should be able to create a font with identical metrics, avoiding reflow problems entirely, I hope.

John