Font Breaker no Heartbreaker
Jan 31st, 2006 by Jinja
Font Breaker no Heartbreaker
[Reader advisory: caution, computer geekery ahead.]
So you’ve got a big document that is in Khmer text. And you’re dejected because it’s in Limon or ABC fonts.
Difficult to make into a PDF, doesn’t work well on the internet for email or web sites. It’s enough to cause heartbreak or heartburn.
What’cha gonna do? Unicode to the rescue!
BhasaKhmer walked me through the ‘font breaker’ programs yesterday.
First you’ll want to have the “limon2unicode” or “abc2unicode” program installed.
(It’s good to have the document in the same directory file as the program.) You may want to make a copy of your original document, for comparison.
Go to your ‘Start’ menu, go to ‘accessories’, then ‘accessibility’, then ‘command prompt’.
Once you’re there you simply type limon2unicode and the document name, with full document extension.
Small catch: we tried it the first time using a MS Word document. Didn’t sort the text. So second time we tried a text file. (See the screenshot for details.)
Shazam. Instant unicode, without formatting. There will be a few words that don’t match up, so the next job is checking the text to see if any vowels or consonants have dropped out.
You can check the Open Forum’s Khmer Open Source site about the availability of keyboards and programs. If you’ve got a fast connection, you can download directly from their site. And don’t forget to check out their ballooning blog community – over 300 strong and growing!
Khmer Open Source: http://www.khmeros.info
KhmerOS Blog portal: http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=en/blog
More about Khmer Unicode explosion:
http://jinja.apsara.org/blog/2006/01/khmer-unicode-is-go.htm
http://jinja.apsara.org/blog/2006/01/more-unicode-fun.htm
Tags: Cambodia
