Part of this Font FAQ was discussed in another thread.It would be a very good idea to have the "language settings" information, and the associated fonts, listed in a wiki page [for now] so our users who use both Latin and non-Latin based languages would have an easier time setting up their package for those languages.
There was a discussion of adding more fonts to the install of LO. It was suggested that there could be a section/page[s] somewhere showing a list of good free fonts that has the needed languages and how to use them [i.e. set up to use them] with LO to write documents in those languages.
There are many fonts out there that work well for Thai and other non-Latin based writings, but sometimes it may be difficult for our users to find the "proper" fonts and set up LO to use them for their documents. Having a list of free fonts and the languages they support [graph or table] could be very helpful to some of our users.
Also, having an explanation on how to set up the language options in LO would be a very good idea at the top of such a list of fonts. This thread seems to indicate that more work in needed to make the setup of different non-Latin based languages within an LO install is needed. How do I get my document to work with the language and be about to edit and print the document correctly using that language.
Having the list of fonts that include the Thai language scripts/glyphs hopefully was helpful to the user. If we could expand the list into some type of table where the rows are the free fonts [maybe paid one that came with the OS] and the columns are the languages supported within the fonts, it may help guide our user to which fonts work well for which languages.
If you are a English and French speaking person that is learning a non-Latin based language, having a list of fonts that support that language is a needed item.
To be honest, I do not use any other language but my native English. But if we get LO in schools/colleges, the students will need to use LO to write in other Latin and non-Latin based languages, while using English for the menus. Having both simple and detailed information on how to set up LO to support all of these languages would be very helpful. Having a documentation, like the solution in this thread, showing the user how to set up a non-Latin based language to be used by the user can be very important to the user. It seems that the current documentation may not be where it is needed, if this thread is any indication. But we can always make it better within the wiki page environment.
On 12/16/2013 06:27 AM, Tom Davies wrote:
Hi :) Would that 1st post by CVAlkan be good for the wiki? Where? In the Faq? https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq Should we forwards that post to the Documentation Team? Regards from Tom :) On 16 December 2013 02:05, Kracked_P_P---webmaster <webmaster@krackedpress.com> wrote:On 12/15/2013 06:07 PM, Dale Erwin wrote:On 12/15/2013 10:16 AM, CVAlkan wrote:Dale: To type and save documents in both Thai and English, which I do quite successfully with LibreOffice and several other products, you need to understand a few things that aren't at all obvious from the documentation. At the end, I'll suggest an easy way to handle multi-lingual documents. Since your difficulty is with LibreOffice Writer, let's start there. and look at a couple things: Open a new blank document. First, go to Format | Character and take a look at the Font tab. In the top section, titled "Western text font" you will see the font that is currently active. The next two sections ("Asian text font" and "CTL font") are key to understand what's going on. If your base font (the one listed in the top section) is NOT a Unicode font, or if it is a Unicode font that doesn't contain Thai characters, you will see the font that LibreOffice - in a not always successful attempt to be helpful - uses as substitutes when you type in a particular character. What happens, therefore, is that Libre Writer gives you the impression that all is wonderful even though it is doing substitutions behind your back. In itself a good thing, but sometimes leads to confusion. It also isn't very clear that "Asian text font" is NOT what you use for your Thai substitutions. Aside from the fact that Thai is actually an Indo-European language, the "Asian text font" section seems to be only applicable to languages that use ideographs (i.e. little pictures) even if they have alphabetic characters. It also relates to languages that are written vertically, although I'm not too sure about that as I don't speak Chinese, Korean, Japanese and similar languages. Now look at the "CTL font" section. What you want to do is to pick a font that you know supports Thai, and choose it in the "CTL font" section as a substitute. The font is listed first, then the size stuff, and then under Language, you would choose Thai to indicate which group of characters within the font are to be used. A CTL font is what's used for substitutions when you are using an "Input Method" to type on the keyboard. Since there are several of these in use it's hard to tell you anything specific, but you've probably already solved that, since I presume you do some typing in English, hit some switch command, type a little Thai, then use the switch command to get back to English. By the way, the default you will often see under CTL font is one of the Hindi fonts (I presume because of Thai's ancient relation to Indian languages) - in Ubuntu, for instance, it is almost always "Lohit Hindi" - a font that is part of the Ubuntu installation. I used Format | Character as an example to make the explanation more clear; obviously there are similar settings in various Paragraph and Style settings as well, and they all work the same. BUT - if you want to make things really simple, you could simply use a font that has both English and Thai characters present, so no substitutions need to take place. Unfortunately there isn't a great variety of really good looking fonts (I'll list some below), but the advantage is that there are no substitutions, and the font sizes are matched more closely than would be the case with two different fonts. This is a matter of taste of course, particularly with balancing Thai and English, since Thai nees room above and below the characters for the various superscript and subscript vowels, tone marks, and such things. (these same issues are not unique to Thai of course - you'll run into them in both Hebrew and Arabic for instance). So, here are my (so far) favorite combination fonts for easily mixing Thai and English in the same document: Free Serif (Serif) Gentium Basic (Serif) xxx Gentium Book (Serif) xxx Norasi (Serif) Kinnari (Serif) Linux Libertine (developed for Linux, but works in Win) Linux Biolinium (ditto) Sawasdee (go figure...) (light Sans Serif) Droid Sans Thai (Sans Serif) Garuda (Sans Serif) Loma (Sans Serif) Umpush (Sans Serif) Waree (Sans Serif) Purisa (informal handwriting style) Tlwg Typist (mono typewriter) Obviously if there are others who use both Thai and English, I'd be interested in any of your favorite fonts. As for moving your document to other machines, Libre Office now has the ability in some versions to embed the fonts in the document file itself, but I'm not sure if all versions and all platforms can utilize the embedded fonts yet. (can anyone help here???) I hope this helps you in your search. -- FrankMany thanks for your reply. At last someone who knows what he's talking about. I don't have all those fonts available, but I do have some and I can now save documents and reopen them intact. I certainly do appreciate this information.Thanks for the list of fonts. As for embedding of fonts, it all depends on if you want to have others edit the document or just view them. I tend to not send out editable documents, unless I am required to. Otherwise I send PDF files. Ubuntu's CUPS-PDF printing works great when LO 4.0.6 does not embed the fonts. 4.1.x, so I have been told, embeds many of the user fonts properly. I have not determined how well it actually does it, but I still print to CUPS-PDF if I want to embed non-standard fonts in the final readable document. We really need a set of font lists like you show above, for the major non-Latin languages. This would be very helpful to our users. Those font lists, plus your description on what to do may really help our users. It should go into some wiki page[s] for easy of use as a helper to those like the original poster with these pesky font problems. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
-- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted