This latest picker includes all characters in the Unicode Lao block, plus a few punctuation characters. There are several alternative views.
Alphabetic By default, characters are arranged by groups, and consonants and vowels are listed in alphabetic order. Digits are in keypad order. Similar characters are highlighted by default, but this can be switched off using the ‘Hint’ selector.
Tone marks and combining vowels are reordered automatically so that vowels come first in the output character sequence.
Phonic Characters are grouped and ordered by sound. I set this up for myself to enter Lao text that I wanted to copy that was accompanied by a transcription. Initial consonants are followed by tones and consonants that come second in a cluster, then vowels. Alternatives with the same sound are separated by a red dot. Consonants that have different sounds when word final are also listed under those sounds. (Dropped aspiration is not considered significant.)
Dashes representing consonants indicate which vowels are non-final or occur before the consonant. Where a vowel has a part that comes before a consonant, a single click should arrange the parts properly. This behaviour speeds up typing. It may not be so intuitive to people familiar with Lao, however, since it makes Lao behave like Khmer and Indic scripts.
You should add any tone mark before the vowel and the picker will automatically reorder characters as needed. If you want to wrap text around a combination of two syllable-initial characters, type the characters then click on ‘flag as cluster’ before clicking on the tone mark or vowel.
Two old vowel spellings are only displayed if you click on the grey arrow, top right.
Font grid Shows characters in Unicode order, using whatever font is specified in the Font list or Custom font input fields. This allows comparison of fonts (especially useful in IE, which shows if a glyph is missing from a font).
You can start up directly in one of the above views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, alphabet, phonic or fontgrid.
Enjoy.