sara am and WTT

Posted September 16th, 2007 by lyndon

สวัสดีครับ

Can someone help me understand sara am in the WTT specification ?

sara am is defined as FV1

1. FV1 is allowed to follow FV1
2. FV1 is allowed to follow NON and CTRL

Rule 1 is necessary for words like เพราะ but I don't know of a case where rule 2 would be useful.

Furthermore, Rule 1 says text can be (sara am)(sara am)... I don't know of any words that have
อำา or อาำ or อะำ or อำะ. Shouldn't sara am be in another group "FV4" or something ?

Rule 2 implies that a line of text can start sara am. Since no words can start sara am I think this is wrong.

QT's font render engine in Window puts repeated sara am in the next cell but renders it with a dotted circle.
I think libthai interprets WTT differently, but can someone confirm how WTT should be interpreted ?

I am using this document for reference: http://linux.thai.net/~thep/th-xim/
Is WTT specification freely available ? I want to read the original document.

Also, I am looking for a good translation of "Above Diacritic" and "Below Diacritic" into Thai.

ขอบคุณครับ

Lyndon

‹ QT และภาษาไทย Firefox บน windows ›

Re: sara am and WTT

On September 16th, 2007 thep says:

WTT was designed based on text console technology, where Sara Am was rendered in an individual desplay cell, rather than decomposed into Nikhahit and Sara Aa. We just adopt it because the rules still work well in general for input/output methods.

However, as you can see, the case of Sara Am apparently needs an adjustment. Please see an example in Pango Thai module:

http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/pango/trunk/modules/thai/thai-charprop.c?vi...

You can see an extra class "AM" for Sara Am. (Another extra class is "BCON". But that's part of another extension to cover Lao.)

Re: sara am and WTT

On September 16th, 2007 lyndon says:

Thanks thep.

Is there any semi-official document that I can use for reference ?
A proposal for a modification to WTT perhaps ?

In the long term, if you have time maybe you could update your document I gave the link for - it was very useful to me.

Another document I've been using is "Thai Input and Output Methods" translated by Chamrat Atsawaprecha but I cannot find a link to it online anymore.

Re: sara am and WTT

On September 19th, 2007 thep says:

Sorry, it's my own customization for GTK+/Pango, which is also adopted in scim-m17n. But it has not been proposed elsewhere so far. WTT is now assigned a TIS standard (I can't remember its number, though), and the Thai API Consortium (TAPIC) that drafted WTT 2.0 had long disbanded. So, any change should be proposed to TISI. But we can't gather enough interests to do it yet.

Yes, I agree to update my doc soon.

Re: sara am and WTT

On September 19th, 2007 lyndon says:

For your information, my implementation is available here:
http://www.lyndonhill.com/Projects/thaicheck.html