Technical Questions and Answers for Using Thai on Your Computer
Get yourself set up so that you can use Thai in all your computer applications.
- How can I read and write Thai email ?
See my Thai Email How To
guide, which covers many aspects of receiving and sending email.
- How can I convert Thai text files ?
thaiconv is
a utility to convert text between various different Thai text formats. You may need
this if you send or receive Thai in your email or write Thai documents.
thaicheck
is a program to check text files have valid letter sequence order. If you
type vowels, tone markers or diacritics in the wrong order, this utility
can find them for you.
- How can I edit Thai text ?
Sontana
is a basic text editor with Thai virtual keyboard, designed to make it easy
to copy and paste Thai email, edit it, export it etc.
- How can I read web pages in Thai ?
This website uses TIS-620 coding for it's pages. TIS is the Thai Institute of
Standards. TIS-620 is a convenient system for joining the Thai alphabet with
7 bit ASCII (so called standard ASCII with no "Latin" characters, i.e accents and
umlauts).
If the following text: ΚΗΡΚ΄Υ does not look something like
this graphic: "" then you
will need to change your font to one that has Thai characters. You can find some
nice fonts by the Thai Linux Working Group on their
ThaiFonts-Scalable
project, there are some more at f0nt.com.
- Why do I sometimes see Thai fonts with the tone markers and vowels in the wrong place ?
The font you are using has not been rendered correctly, this can happen for several reasons:
- You are entering TIS-620 coded characters with a Thai font but the application does not
know this is Thai. Try changing the character coding of the application or switch to
an input method that enters Unicode.
- You are trying to use a fixed width font in an application that does not understand
Thai fixed width fonts. Try changing to a proportional width font.
If none of this succeeds you can copy and paste the text into Sontana (the text editor mentioned
above) which should be able to make it readable.