Re: Display of Lao script

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

[Adding Handa-san, in the hope that he could comment on this.]

> From: Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net>
> Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 01:14:03 +0200
> 
> Is this difference expected?  I'm not familiar with the Lao script, so I
> don't know if one of the displays is wrong, though this quote from
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lao_alphabet seems to suggest that either
> way is possible: "Vowels can be written above, below, in front of, or
> behind consonants, with some vowel combinations written before, over and
> after."  This is m17n-lib-1.7.0 and libotf-0.9.13 from
> http://www.nongnu.org/m17n/, which are AFAIK the latest released
> versions (there's a patch for Bengali in etc/PROBLEMS, but I don't know
> of any problem report about Lao).  (Regardless if what's correct, my
> aesthetic impression is that the first display, without m17n and libotf,
> looks better; however, I do know that the Arabic example in HELLO is
> correctly displayed only with these libraries).

I see a better display here, on MS-Windows.  Can you try a different
font, perhaps one that is advertised to have good support for the Lao
script?  AFAIK, libotf/libm17n (as any other shaping engine) depend on
font capabilities to some extent.