Click on characters below to create text in the box below that, then copy & paste to your content.
Phoneme bank:
Font list:
Custom font:
Size:
Rows:
Add codepoint:
Search for:
Normalise: NFC
Autofocus: On
Notes:
You must have JavaScript enabled. Choose a view from the list just below the page title. To produce text in the output area, click on character shapes, or use your keyboard for Latin characters, delete, etc. Then cut & paste the result to your document, or use the buttons to get further information about the characters.
You can also add codepoints and escapes via the "Add codepoint" field (hit return to add to the output field). You can also paste text into the output field to get information about it. Use the yellow boxes to set preferences or search. Regular expressions are allowed when searching – for example, to find characters with the word KA in their name, enter \bka\b, or the short form :ka:.
About the chart
Includes all the characters in the Unicode Lao block.
All text is output in Unicode normalisation form NFC by default. You can change to NFD or no normalisation by clicking on the buttons in the yellow area. Note that normalization only takes place when you click on a character - text pasted into the box won't be normalised until you click on another character above, or click on a button in the yellow area. (Note: normalization is turned off for Han characters in this application.)
Alternative views
The following alternative views are available by clicking just below the page title. You can start up directly in one of the views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, default, shape, transcription, phones or fontgrid.
Default This view is likely to be most useful to people who are somewhat familiar with the alphabet and characters of Lao. Characters are arranged based on the use of the script in order to speed up picking.
Vowel signs that appear before consonants are to the left, the consonants are to their right in alphabetic order, and all the other characters are to the right of them. The latter have been arranged so that is easy to input multiple characters in the right normalised order: characters above precede those below, characters to the left precede those to the right. Four consonant characters, O, NYO, WO, and SEMIVOWEL NYO are repeated here because they frequently appear after vowels. The bottom two lines contain numbers, punctuation and other symbols.
Shape This view is purely based around shape, and is therefore good when you don't know the script well at all, or for shapes you don't know. Characters are grouped and ordered by visual similarity.
Each orange key near the top of the page represents a significant part of the shape of two or more characters; as you mouse over the keys, characters and combinations of characters that incorporate that shape are displayed below. Click on these characters to add them to the output. Within a group I attempted to put easily confusable characters close to each other.
The shapes grouped under 'Other' are a mixed bag of characters that didn't fit elsewhere.
A small orange plus sign to the right of a shape indicates that you will find similar shapes after the large plus sign to the right of the current line. These characters may cause confusion because they share elements, or because their shape may be similar, though not quite the same.
Transcription I use this for typing in text for which I have a transcription, or for creating phonetic transcriptions.
The large characters on an orange background represent characters used by Simmala and Poomsan Becker in Lao for Beginners. To type Lao text starting from a transcription, click on these characters. If there is only one Lao character corresponding to the transcription letter, it is inserted directly into the output field. If there are multiple alternatives, these are presented to you in a selection list: click on the Lao character you need in the selection list and it is added to the output. Hyphens are used to indicate syllabic contexts.
Each Lao character is associated with a phonetic symbol (a Latin/IPA symbol on white background to its left in the selection lists). If there is more than one possible phonic representation you will see the selection list divided appropriately. In some cases a Lao character is repeated within the same selection list because it has more than one possible phonetic equivalent - in such cases, choose the right one if you want to generate this phonetic transcription. As you select characters, the phonetic symbol to its left is added to the Phoneme bank area, below the output area.It is quite basic, but is offered as a way of speeding up text entry where you want to type both the Myanmar characters and the phonemic transcription. You can edit the text in the phoneme bank, if you wish, and you can move it into the main output area at the current cursor position by clicking on Add.
Transcribed tone marks are provided at the bottom: you currently need to add tones to the transcription afterwards by positioning the cursor in the right place and clicking on one of these graphics. Hyphens are provided for the silent or inherent sounds (eg. 'o') to help produce these transcriptions. They produce no output in Lao script, but the phonemic value is stored in the phoneme bank.
Dashes representing consonants indicate which vowels are non-final or occur before the consonant. All vowels should be typed after the initial consonant(s).Where a vowel has a part that comes before a consonant, a single click should arrange the parts properly. This behaviour speeds up typing. It may not be so intuitive to people familiar with Lao, however, since it makes Lao behave like Khmer and Indic scripts. (Note that this automatic reordering only applies in the Transcript view.)
You should add any tone mark immediately before the vowel and the picker will automatically reorder characters as needed.
If you want to wrap text around a combination of two syllable-initial characters, type the characters then click on 'flag as cluster' before clicking on the tone mark or vowel. This feature is switched on automatically when you click on several digraphs in the consonant section.
For less common characters, switch to the Alphabetic view.
As you mouse over the Latin characters on the grey background, the corresponding Lao characters are also displayed near the top of the page. This is to aid in searching.
Transcription > Latin This represents the union of all transcription and phonetic characters, and is provided in case you wish to just type in a transcription directly.
Font grid Shows characters in Unicode order, using whatever font is specified in the Font list or Custom font input fields. This allows comparison of fonts (especially useful in IE, which shows if a glyph is missing from a font).
Other features
For further information about features of the tool or user interface, see How to use.
Useful URIs
Lao lite, a cut-down version of this picker for handheld devices.
