It has been a constant frustration to me in the last two years, as a person who prefers the Macintosh to the Windoze PC, that Apple had never bothered to fully implement the unicode standards for complex character sets, like those of Khmer, which requires the ability to have not only superscripts and subscripts, but also vowel signs that literally wrap around the consonant.
ជយោ!!!
So it is with great surprise that I saw that a former post I’d written, about my teacher (លោកគ្រូ) was suddenly rendering the text properly! It’s not a Firefox change, either (Windows users have been able to use properly rendered text in Firefox and Thunderbird for ages) – It appears to be a proper update to Apple’s own OS!
So now, I can finally start using wonderful tools like Transcriva to transcribe my interviews in Khmer, and converse with my Khmer-only friends in their own language, via Apple Mail!
@Apple អរគុណ ធំៗ!
Hi Erik. Are you talking about KhmerOS? I’ve been using another Khmer Unicode system developed by Xenotype in Hawaii; the keyboard layout and everything are just the same. The only drawback is that it has only one font, and it isn’t that good looking.
Hey Mongkol – Yes, I also using Xenotype, which I find perfectly okay for my current needs, which are limited to rendering Khmer in more sophisticated ways than the numerous (almost all awful) transcriptions and transliterations that are floating around. The problem I was addressing here, though, was limited to Apple’s (Macintosh) Operating System, which until a recent system update, was completely unable to render Khmer. So, when I would write លោកគ្រូ it would show up as លោក គ្រូ. Frustrating, but now it’s fixed!
Strangely, while Khmer now renders fine in Firefox, Thunderbird, Transcriva, and a host of other applications, it STILL doesn’t render in Camino (another Mozilla product), and I can’t even input into Microsoft Word.
That’s true. It caught me by surprise too when I began using Firefox 3 the other day.
Every time I need to type Khmer, I would use NeoOffice, the twin version of OpenOffice, which works perfectly fine with unicode. SI hope more Khmer fonts will be developed for Mac. We need more varieties..
Unfortunately, it is now rather clear to me that Apple is not the savior here, but Firefox is. Word still doesn’t render well, although Transcriva does. Confusing. Ah, well.
Hi everyone!
Can any one help to solve the problem i have faced with Xenotype? I can not type subscripts consonant i tried many ways but it was in vain. Now i am here to seek help from friends who kind enough to help me.
I am looking forward to hearing from you all.
Thank