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I did some correspondence and have some additional information to post. Some the information is useful for people with a similar problem who might check this site. And, there is need for some more help. One solution to this is to import the PM6.5 file (from Windows) into In Design. That could help C. Carroll. I believe that the foundation which will publish his translation has ID on Macs. I still need to be able to create documents in Lao with my PM7 on WinXP. I don't have any budget to buy ID. I haven't had any success even with the unicode fonts yet. But let's try to help C.Carroll first. He is doing a very worthwhile project. I hope this long post is OK. I value this site and would like to respect the people who monitor it. Read on. Geoffrey

--------- message to John, creator of Lao Script & some fonts -----
Dear John,
          Let me give you a little background about myself first: I live and work in Udon Thani Thailand. I have some projects to do manuals in Lao so I'm familiar with LaoScript some. I use Adobe PageMaker 7.0.1.a on WinXP with Distiller 6 and Acrobat 6 (I also have Acrobat 7 reader). Every week I browse a summary of the Pagemaker user groups postings. Recently I saw a posting about Lao. I responded with an offer to try to help.

          C.Carroll spent some time in Lao and ended up working to translate a book on how to help deaf children. The translation is complete. They did it in Pagemaker 6.5 with SaysetthaLao fonts. They want to put it in pdf format to increase accesibility. Their problem is that when they convert it to pdf, the 'naw nok' disappears. There is no character, no box, no blank space, no 'naw nok'.

          I selected text from their pdf and found that there is a character there but Acrobat isn't showing it. I looked at the different font sets that come with LaoScript and tried to print them to a pdf from pagemaker. I can't get any Lao characters to appear. I've checked my PPD and tried exporting to pdf. I've tried setting compatibility to a few different versions and nothing has helped.

          It seems that Charles has started a very good and worthwhile project and could use a litte help. Can you give us any direction as to what we can do to get his document to pdf format with all Lao characters?

          Charles is sending me the complete large document on a CD. I might end up doing the final pdf creation. So, I need to be able to get my system up with some Lao font that works.

          Thank you for your consideration.

          Sincerely yours,

Geoffrey Wheeler

* ************************* reply from John ******************* Hello Geoffrey

Thank you for your message.

The problem with the disappearing ‘naw nok’ is well known, and was the reason why the Saysettha 2000 series of fonts were introduced (in 2000), and why I strongly advise people to use only Lao Unicode for any new documents, as increasing problems can be expected with all non-standard coding.

The underlying issue is that the codepoint used for ‘naw nok’ in Saysettha Lao is reserved by many applications for optional hyphen, so is often filtered out, or handled differently, either on input, or when displayed.

It may be relevant that if (for example) a Word document with Lao text (using Saysettha Lao) is converted to PDF by Distiller (or any other Adobe application), then the “naw nok” characters disappear when the PDF is viewed. However, if the same document is converted using PDF Creator (a widely used open source PDF converter), the characters remain visible, no matter which viewer is used. That suggests that Distiller (or Pagemaker) is marking the characters in some way. If a way can be found to ensure that the characters remain simply 8-bit codes, and are not identified as special characters, then it may be possible to get them exported without losing them. I don’t have a copy of Distiller or Acrobat available immediately, so can’t test this, but will try it with InDesign and see if I can find a solution that works with InDesign. (As you are probably aware, Pagemaker documents can be readily imported into InDesign.)

Another possibility (also using InDesign) would be to use the Lao Add-In for InDesign, which includes font conversion options. Again, I am not sure whether or not it will work until trying a test document, but if so, the documents could all be converted to Unicode and an appropriate Unicode font (e.g. Saysettha OT) used.

I will explore the options a bit more and let you know, but if you have a sample document you can send, it may make it easier and faster to find a solution.

Regards,
John
Lao Script for Windows