Support for Thai text!

[UncleMonkey]

Right now both Artistic and Frame text tools mishandle Thai language text. Thai has a number of glyphs that go over or under the preceding glyph, like these two which spell the word duu, meaning to look: ดู In Designer, typing those two characters gives ด ู, which is an unreadable garble.

 

Bizarrely, Affinity Photo handles Thai artistic and frame text okay, so the workaround isn't a hard one. But why make any workaround necessary?

[Dave Harris]

I'm surprised that Photo and Designer are handling text differently, as they share the same code. Can you attach an example of a document that renders Thai text correctly in Photo and wrongly in Designer?

[UncleMonkey]

Hi, Dave,

 

Oops! I didn't experiment long enough. Sometimes Thai text works flawlessly in both artistic and frame mode, in Photo and Designer. Sometimes it works in one and not the other. Sometimes I have to paste from a word processing application; sometimes nothing at all will produce correctly composed text. After I upgrade to OS X El Capitan, I'll post an update.

[Hiswe]

Hi,

I have the same issue in both Affinity Designer 1.6.0 and Affinity Photo 1.6.6 on Mac OS 10.13.2

I put a screenshot of the rendered text in both artistic and frame text tool.

If you want to reproduce, just copy and paste any Thai text from http://www.thai-language.com/ref/vowels#monophthong-chart using any of those tools.

Typing the the text in thai got the same result.

 

[UncleMonkey]

That problem occurs with font that don't have proper data (dunno the tech term) for positioning Thai floating vowels and diacritics — not only Arial, but a couple of old Mac Thai system fonts. If you use modern Thai fonts, things work as they should. You can get a bunch at f0nt.com (that's a zero before the "n"). See the sample comparing Arial with circular below.

It's not a black-and-white issue: some fonts look fine until you want to typeset something like ปิ้ง, where the diacritic needs to be shifted from its normal position to keep from overlapping an overhead vowel. When I used to do Letraset and bromide typography, the mai ek needed four different positions to look good; I haven't found a font that handles ปู่ the way I like, with the ่ over the stem of the ป.

[Hiswe]

Hi @UncleMonkey

Thanks for your feedback

Before posting I had tried with the “Thonburi” font without any success. I assumed all Thai fonts were behaving the same.
And you're right any of those are ok :

• Ayuthaya
• Krungthep
• Sathu
• Silom

But for what I am doing I need the most classical Thai font… the one used when learning.
Do you have any advice about what to use?

Anyway thank you for pointing to f0nt.com. I'm right now browsing it to hopefully find I want

 

 

 

[UncleMonkey]

Hi, Hiswe,

I'd say Microsoft's Angsana New is pretty close to schoolbook text; TH Sarabun New (a Thai government font available free on the 'net) is clear and unstyled, too.

[Hiswe]

Thanks @UncleMonkey for the help