Lao character picker

Reference material:

Quick start

(You must have JavaScript enabled.) Choose a view (see below). Click on characters/shapes to insert text into the output field or use your keyboard for Latin characters, delete, etc. You can also add codepoints and escapes via the "Add codepoint" field (hit return to add to the output field).

Then cut & paste the result to your document, or use the tabs to get further information about the characters. You can also paste text into the output field to get information about it. Use the yellow box to set preferences or search (regular expressions allowed - for example, to find the letter GA surrounded by spaces in the name, enter \bga\b, or the short form :ga:).

About the chart

Includes all the characters in the Unicode Lao block.

All text is output in Unicode normalisation form NFC by default. You can change to NFD or no normalisation by clicking on the buttons in the yellow area. Note that normalization only takes place when you click on a character - text pasted into the box won't be normalised until you click on another character above, or click on a button in the yellow area. (Note: normalization is turned off for Han characters in this application.)

Alternative views are available. You can start up directly in one of the views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, default, shape, transcript or fontgrid.

Default This view is likely to be most useful to people who are somewhat familiar with the alphabet and characters of Lao. Characters are arranged to assist in input: vowel signs that appear before consonants are to the left, the consonants are to their right in alphabetic order, and all the other characters are to the right of them. The latter have been arranged so that is easy to input multiple characters in the right normalised order: characters above precede those below, characters to the left precede those to the right. Four consonant characters, O, NYO, WO, and SEMIVOWEL NYO are repeated here because they frequently appear after vowels. The bottom two lines contain numbers, punctuation and other symbols.

Shape This view is purely based around shape, and is therefore good when you don't know the script well at all, or to find shapes you don't know.

Characters are grouped and ordered by visual similarity. The orange shapes at the top typically indicate a fundamental part of a character shape; characters and combinations that include that shape are arranged together. Within a group I attempted to put easily confusable characters close to each other. The 'misc' section at the bottom lists a mixed bag of characters that didn't fit elsewhere.

A small orange plus sign to the right of a shape indicates that there are similar shapes outside the current group. These will be highlighted when you mouse over the shape with the plus sign.

Transcript I use this for typing in text for which I have a transcription, or for creating phonemic transcriptions.

The consonant characters used for transliteration are arranged in groups, similarly to where that transliteration character would typically appear in a standard IPA chart. (So, for example, if 'zh' were actually pronounced 'p', you would look for it under the fricatives, not the plosives.) The large characters on a grey background represent the transcription used by Simmala and Poomsan Becker in Lao for Beginners, and the small Latin letters on white background indicate IPA characters, where they vary from the former. (In the case of multiple alternatives, tooltips often explain usage contexts.) Hyphens are used to indicate syllabic contexts.

You can use the transcription letters to find a Lao character and add it to the output area (by clicking on the Lao character), or you can click directly on the transcription letter to produce a transcription.

For less common characters, switch to the Default view.

Dashes representing consonants indicate which vowels are non-final or occur before the consonant. All vowels should be typed after the initial consonant(s). 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. (Note that this automatic reordering only applies in the Transcript view.)

You should add any tone mark immediately 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. This feature is switched on automatically when you click on several digraphs in the consonant section.

While you click on Lao characters in the Transcript view, the picker automatically records in a buffer the associated phonemic character (ie. the nearest transciption character to the left of each character you click on). Clicking on this icon will dump those characters into the output area at the current cursor position, and clear the buffer. It is quite basic (for example, it doesn't take into account backspacing), but is offered as a way of speeding up text entry where you want to type both the Lao characters and the phonemic transcription. Transcribed tone marks are provided at the bottom: you currently need to add tones to the transcription afterwards by positioning the cursor in the right place and clicking on one of these graphics.

Hyphens are provided for the silent or inherent sounds (eg. 'o') to help produce these transcriptions. They produce no output in Lao script, but the phonemic value is stored in the buffer.

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).

Useful URIs

Instructions for use

Downloadable TrueType and OpenType fonts: David McCreedy, Alan Wood

Other pickers

Lao script notes (my rough notes)

Lao block in UniView

If something is missing

... let me know.