ศาลาชุมนุม

I just bought a PowerMac G4, and use Internet Explorer 5.2, but the Thai character set is not on the View menu. There has to be a way to read pages in Thai. This is not a problem on the PC. Can anyone help? Thanks.

With the Mac, you have to install a Thai font first. There are a few web pages which explain how to do this; you can find them by searching in Google with "thai font mac".

If you have any helpful tips after you go through the procedure, please post them here. Good luck,

Glenn

สวัสดีครับชาลี ,

How are you? Glad to hear that you finally got your PowerMac G4! Here are some resources for you:

• Installing Thai Font: Mac
• Thai Font for Mac
• Enable Thai on Mac (with illus.)
• How to Set Thai for IE (with illus.)
• See also this old post: Google search results on this topic (by "foureyes") ( http://www.thai-language.com/ubb_cgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=19;t=000002)

Good luck na khrub. Once you are done, e-mail me a Thai message from your Mac to test!
(Ready for the upcoming trip? )

Thanks, Glenn and Bryan. Here we go:

This posting covers two topics relating to Thai fonts on the Macintosh computer (OS X): reading Thai fonts in websites and creating documents in Thai. This was occasioned by the dearth of information available on the topic.

I have spent several hours researching the use of Thai fonts in web browsers for the Mac, and have come to the conclusion that Internet Explorer is not the best browser for this purpose. Netscape 7.0 is easier to use and configure, but the best browser I have seen so far is OmniWeb (http://www.omnigroup.com/), which, once you figure out how to set the encoding, is more elegant and easier to read. I have purchased a license for OmniWeb ($29.95), but you can get free trial licenses; I recommend you try it out.

One of the best walk-through guides for setting Thai fonts in browsers is http://203.151.217.14/tip_trick/set_thai_on_net/setting_eng.html

The instructions are fairly clear and easy to follow. In the section on OmniWeb, it took me a while to figure out instruction no. 4, however, so I have edited it to read: If you want to change font encoding from the browser's toolbar, go to the Browser menu and select Customize Toolbar. Drag the Character Encoding icon up and drop it into the browser's toolbar. Now you can select your encoding from there. (This is a great feature, by the way.)

Another site for good information is http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/tg3907/mlingos9.html

This site also has a good walk-through for novices: http://homepage.mac.com/rgriff/ Download the pdf file on OS X Multiple Languages.

Text editors are another matter. The TextEdit program that comes with the Mac OS X works just fine, but of course it's pretty primitive as far as word processing goes. I need MS Word in my work, and so have it for the Mac, but apparently it simply doesn't provide a Thai keyboard.

When you set up OS X to be able to type in Thai, you do it through the System Preferences / International / Input Menu. Click in the box by the Thai flag, and this invokes the Thai keyboard. The Thai flag and U.S. flag icons then appear in the menu of your text editors. So far so good; as I said, it works fine in TextEdit. But in MS Word, the Thai flag is grayed out, and you can't click on it; hence, no Thai keyboard. If I'm missing something, somebody please tell me.

This does not mean, however, that you can't type in Thai at all in MS Word v.X. You can, but you have to load Thai fonts. You can find Thai fonts in various places. I loaded a decent one from http://www.seasite.niu.edu/seasite.htm (easy instructions included) and it showed up in Word's Font menu. By simply selecting a font, you can type with it. I downloaded some others from various places, and some are not very good, but I defer to K. Suphawut on fonts; he's the expert, as he is on so many subjects. Here are a few more links, some of which I got from him (I haven't checked them all out yet):

http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/thai.html
http://www.fedu.uec.ac.jp/ZzzThai/fonts.html
http://www.mthai.com/files/desktop/fonts/
http://software.thai.net/tis-620/fonts.html

The difference is, of course, in having a wider range of choices for formatting fonts. In MS Word for Windows, I can invoke the Thai keyboard through the menu system (or a keyboard shortcut) and format the fonts any way I like using fonts that also work with Roman script: Tahoma, MS Sans Serif, even Times Roman (pretty ugly, in case you're tempted to try it). So far in MS Word v.X for Mac, I am stuck with the fonts I download and can only format them with the standard tools: bold, italics, etc.

By the way, Alan Wood has some technical observations about text editors on his website, but I'm not sure I understand everything he is saying; maybe you'll have more luck:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_editors_macosx.html

He discusses several editors, but except for TextEdit and MS Word v.X, I haven't tried any of them.

This is a very brief introduction to the topic. I hope it's clear. There's a whole lot of often conflicting information out there. I'll pass on more facts as I learn them, and will happily accept observations, comments and suggestions from anyone. If there enough Mac users out there, maybe we can figure out more of these issues together.

ชาลี

<Charlie,

I'm in a similar situation. I've been a Mac user for 15 years. My wife is Thai. She's been using my Mac computers for two years to read thai webpages. After playing with all the different browsers out there I decided Mozilla was the best. http://www.mozilla.org

Mozilla is the development team for netscape. Their browser is basically netscape without the junk making it a bit faster. Personally I thought Omniweb was unreliable and bugy.

As for the word processing, TextEdit is the only program that I know of that you can use to type in Thai. However I intend to look into OpenOffice.org via X11 running alongside OS X.>

If anyone has any Thai on Mac questions just drop me an email or instant message me on aol at BMD98. I've been pretty successful at getting it to work.

As for my concern:
My wife has never really typed in thai because I don't have a thai keyboard. I nearly bought one from an apple dealer in Pantip during our last visit but it would cost between $70 and $100. So she siad it wasn't that important. However now she had decided she wants to write a novel, so she needs a keyboard. All of the keyboards I've found on the net are for Windows only. At this point I'd am willing to pay the $100 for the apple keyboard with the little Thai letters painted on. I just can't find any sites that have them.

Does anyone have any idea where I can get a keyboard that will work with my mac? Or for that matter where can I get the stickers?

Thanks.

Ooopps. The above comment is mine. Sorry, I forgot to login.

Hi guys
thanks for all the tips on installing a thai font on to a mac, but I still can not read the thai on this website. I have gone through every process outlind above....I have the fonts on my computer and IE is set to Thai (th) and Thonburi but I still cannot read anything. Does anyone have any ideas?? I have been looking for a thai translator for so long and I was so excited when I finally found one but I cannot read antyhing!!!
Please help if you can.

Lza,

You might try experimenting with the "font name" setting in the site control panel. Maybe if you set that to match the name of the Thai Mac font you installed it might work?

if i may say, it works just fine with safari... ok, the browser *does* have other problems, but at least this site looks good (download on this page) . i didn't even have to install a thai font, it seems to be included in macos (i'm running 10.2.6), only IE can't find it... besides, don't expect future versions of IE to do it better, there won't be any.

:-Pagod

On this site, Safari is the perfect browser.

Not so on other sites, where you have to go to Firefox and then do the configuring of text encoding, etcetera. But here, it is one-stop shopping.

This is also the best on-line Thai-English resource going.

And many thanks for it, Glenn.