Thai support in all products

[raguay]

All Affinity products do not properly display and edit the Thai language. I don't use Design or Photo with much Thai, but Publisher will be used with Thai a lot. For me, it's not usable right now. When will that be supported?

[Gnobelix]

hello raguay,

it will take some time until the language files are available.
look here

 

Cheers

[Alfred]

7 minutes ago, Gnobelix said:

it will take some time until the language files are available.
look here

That thread is about the lack of user interface languages other than English in Affinity Publisher. The OP is asking about proper support for the Thai language in documents.

[raguay]

Yes. I'm not interested in the program showing Thai for the menus and such. I want to be able to format Thai documents in Affinity Publisher and make art of Thai letters in Affinity Design. Right now, all the characters that show above and below other characters are instead taking up their own spot. Very annoying.

[Gnobelix]

oh sorry, then I did not understand something.

[stokerg]

1 hour ago, raguay said:

All Affinity products do not properly display and edit the Thai language.

Which fonts are you using?  We do have an issue logged where certain fonts don't display correctly but from reading this post there are a few suggestions which work.  Also from reading our log file, i believe TH Sarabun New should also work. 

[raguay]

Oh, I see. Yes, some of my fonts work with Thai in Affinity products and some don't. I'll make a note of that. Good information. I didn't realize some of the standard system fonts don't have the proper information for the Thai fonts (Arial and such). They all work in browser based programs.

[cc7]

Thai fonts is complex script there are a lot of vowels. Hope to see Thai language display correctly soon because I have to use Thai fonts for my work.

[raguay]

1 minute ago, cc7 said:

Thai fonts is complex script there are a lot of vowels. Hope to see Thai language display correctly soon because I have to use Thai fonts for my work.

Certain Thai fonts to work. Many of them do not properly have their information in the font so they do not show up properly. But, Thai fonts that have all the proper information in the font do work fine. I guess we just need better fonts! For example, the Ayuthaya font works, but Arial doesn't work. Just pick the Thai fonts that work and use them.

[Jim Larson]

It's now 2021. I'm still hoping for Thai language support, although a few fonts work ok.. I'm not complaining, just hoping to encourage the developers to keep this on the road map. 🙂

[bantolec]

Could you tell me which fonts you have working?

[Alfred]

16 minutes ago, bantolec said:

Could you tell me which fonts you have working?

Did you see this post?

On 8/30/2018 at 12:51 PM, stokerg said:

Which fonts are you using?  We do have an issue logged where certain fonts don't display correctly but from reading this post there are a few suggestions which work.  Also from reading our log file, i believe TH Sarabun New should also work. 

From the link in the above post:

 

[felix10250]

My font of choice is working. However hyphenation is still simply not happening. Tried adding libre office's dict files but without success.

[Old Bruce]

2 hours ago, felix10250 said:

My font of choice is working. However hyphenation is still simply not happening. Tried adding libre office's dict files but without success.

Do you have hyphenation turned on with the Paragraph Style?

[felix10250]

Hi Bruce, thanks. Yes, I download all 5 files from https://github.com/LibreOffice/dictionaries/tree/master/th_TH and put them in the correct folder. I am able to choose Thai as the language for spelling, and both typography options. However not for hyphenation which only has 8 languages to select from (English, French, Italian, etc.). Thai is not in that list. I also activated auto-hyphenation (see screenshot) but that doesn't seem to have an any affect.

I also tried finding other th_TH packages but those didn't work either. I also noted that there is no "hyph_th_TH.dic" file and I was unable to find one (if it even exists of course). Also searching in my old Scribus environment (an open source DTP software which was able to do Thai hyphenation) did not help, I could not find any file that looked like a "missing key" or something...

[walt.farrell]

7 hours ago, felix10250 said:

Yes, I download all 5 files from https://github.com/LibreOffice/dictionaries/tree/master/th_TH and put them in the correct folder.

 

7 hours ago, felix10250 said:

I also noted that there is no "hyph_th_TH.dic" file

Right. That site does not supply a hyphenation dictionary for Thai, and therefore auto-hyphenation won't work.

[felix10250]

Ok, thanks for checking -- I wasn't sure wheather or not "hyph_th_TH" was a thing or not. I only vaguely remembered something from way back. If anyone has an idea where I could get the hyphenation file for Thai, that would very helpful for me. I tried several Google searches for "hunspell th_th" and the likes but I can't seem to find a "hyph_th_th" file.

[ejmeier]

On 9/3/2021 at 6:08 PM, walt.farrell said:

Right. That site does not supply a hyphenation dictionary for Thai, and therefore auto-hyphenation won't work.

A few months after this post, a hyphenation dictionary "hyph_th_TH.dic" for Thai was added to the GitHub page.

Unfortunately, this STILL has not seemed to fix the problem. It's possible I am overlooking a setting in some area of Designer. But I tried typing the same phrase in both Designer and LibreOffice, and when I resize the text window to force a line break and/or hyphen break, Designer still gets it wrong (despite having the hyphenation dictionary) while LibreOffice handles it correctly and breaks at the right place.

Am I missing something here?

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, ejmeier said:

Unfortunately, this STILL has not seemed to fix the problem. It's possible I am overlooking a setting in some area of Designer.

You cannot enable automatic hyphenation in Designer; that is a function of the. Paragraph panel (or Paragraph Text Styles) that is reserved for Publisher.

If you enable it in Publisher I think it will work properly in Designer, though.

[ejmeier]

Thanks, I was able to get Thai auto-hyphenation working in Publisher, but the results are not as expected. The program is only adding hyphens in the middle of long words, but the problem is that Thai uses very few spaces (usually just one at the end of a sentence or clause). So it appears Publisher is only adding hyphens in the middle of words, when it really should be detecting whole words (written in sentences without spaces) and preferentially breaking the line between words, which it is not.

Also, I guess the last hump to get over would be that Thai hardly ever uses printed hyphens, so I'd be looking for the functionality of the line breaks, but with no visible hyphen. (I believe there are workarounds for this, but I have yet to get the word breaks to work yet.)

[Andrew Mac]

This is what stops me from using Publisher and the other Affinity products. Although it may set the tone marks correctly, and although it implies Thai language support in various places (character language options in paragraph styles, for instance), it simply does not recognise word boundaries and breaks words in the wrong places. It's what @ejmeier is pointing out above.

Imagine this is a paragraph. Just imag
ine if this kept happening in English.
(and yes, that line break in the middle of the word 'imagine' is deliberate; it shows the problem in Thai)

Hyphenation and vowel placement are not the issues here. The rather basic and obvious ability to have words stay together is something Affinity has never been able to do in Thai. Adobe InDesign does it, Microsoft Word does it, Apple Pages does it; many other programs do it.

Publisher—the one I really want to use above all these—does not.

Sadly, this means that every time I try to move everything to Publisher, which I've attempted plenty of times over the years, I always have to give up and go back to InDesign and Pages. I do a lot of commercial work for Thai customers; Affinity Publisher is, unfortunately, can never an option until this is fixed.