🚀 go-pugleaf

John sent me this email:

After some further playing around, I realized that the simplest solution was
probably simply to add the duplicated 'naw nok' into an empty code point in
an updated copy of Saysettha Lao (Medium and Bold). Since I created those
fonts in the first place, I can do that quite legitimately! I only wish I
had thought of doing that about ten years ago when the problem first
surfaced. (My son Marc, who was responsible for the first ever production
of the Lao "Gold Pages" phone book, by Australia's Telstra, in 1996,
reminded me yesterday that it was a problem he had to work around even
then.) The problem was that there were other issues as well, and I hoped to
fix more of them by recoding a lot of the character set (Saysettha 2000),
but in the absence of any kind of standard, as more applications were used
new incompatibilities arose. Only Unicode provided a solution, and
Pagemaker, like many other applications, never implemented real Unicode
support.

Anyway, if you simply remove your copy of the Saysettha Regular (Medium) and
Bold fonts (probably SAYSETTA.TTF and SAYSETTB.TTF) from your WINDOWS\Fonts
folder, and replace them by the two font files in the attached zip file, you
can then simply replace all of the 'naw nok' codepoints in a document by
using search and replace, selecting "All stories", and replacing Alt 0173 by
Alt 0223. In the story editor, even if the font is set to Saysettha Lao,
which I assume you have been doing, the find and replace text boxes use a
system font, and the two characters will appear as a dash and a german
double s (like the Greek beta) [or whatever is in the system font set].

You may need to delete the Adobe font list (in the windows\Fonts folder) and
let PM rebuild it in order for the font to be properly recognized.

The attached zip also includes the sample document, with the 'naw nok'
replaced, and a PDF that I produced, using PDF Creator. Since I don't have
Distiller on my machine, PM would not create a PDF.

To be sure, I also copied the text into InDesign [G’s note: on WinXP SP3?] and exported it as PDF, using Adobe's PDF export, and the result retains the 'naw nok' characters
fine, unlike the uncorrected text using the old font.

I will probably replace the Saysettha fonts in the next update of Lao Script
for Windows with the modified fonts, since it doesn't change anything for
existing documents or use (the old code point is still there), but allows PM
and other applications to use the new codepoint for naw nok if needed.

One other piece of information - if it becomes relevant. My son Marc
downloaded and installed a trial copy of InDesign CS4 yesterday (yes, it
took hours, even with a very fast ADSL connection) and was able to import
the PM file without any problem. So they seem to have corrected that issue
finally. But converting the text to use a Unicode font would still involve
quite a lot of work and I think that using the updated Saysettha Lao font
and replacing the naw nok codepoint throughout is going to be an easier
solution.

I hope this helps.
Regards,
John

[notes in brackets are from Geoffrey]
I'll post a url to the LaoScript website when he updates it to have the new fonts.

I'm happy we could find a solution. Geoffrey