Does Adove FrameMaker 7.0 support Thai language?

[Guest]

Hello,

after creating a sample document with some Thai text, I save it as MIF 7.0 . There is a prompt saying that saving in this format will cause loss of information related to new features. Then, after reopening the file in FrameMaker instead of Thai characters i get question marks.

I'm using Adobe FrameMaker v10 , Thai Kedmanee keyboards, my text is written using font that supports Thai characters (Angsana New) .

So, ladies and gentlemen - is there anything i can do with this or FrameMaker 7.0 just does not support Thai language?

Thanks in advance,

Chris

[Arnis Gubins]

FrameMaker 7 was not unicode aware and had to use codepage version of fonts, i.e. all glyphs had to be in the first 255 characters of the font. Content in FM10 uses the proper unicode values, and these do not map back to the 255 codepage ranges.

In order to use Thai with FM7 from content generated in FM10, you would need to run a utility/script that changes the unicode values of the characters to the corresponding glyph representation in the codepage enabled fonts that you are using in FM7.

Note: the content may appear to be visually correct, but anyone trying to search a PDF version of this would run into issues.

[Guest]

Thank you for your answer Arnis.

I've tried to just put in MIF Thai characters encoded in UTF-8 (like ๆไำพะั) and in Unicode (like \xe41 \xe2d \xe49 ) . Both approaches failed. Thus, can you tell me what do you specifically mean by "corresponding glyph representation in the codepage enabled fonts that you are using in FM7" ? Is this some set of character codes related with font that I'm using or encoding used in FM7?

[Bob_Niland]

To expand on Arnis' reply, FM8, 9, 10 or 11 is going to create document text that is encoded as Unicode, specifically UTF8.

Saving back to MIF7 probably does not result in the encoding being reverted to legacy 8-bit with codepage overlays for non-Roman characters. You might get reversion for Roman text, and perhaps for certain special characters known to FM, but certainly not for Thai. Frame would have no idea what the glyph mapping is from Unicode to any arbitrary legacy 8-bit Thai font.

In addition to that, Thai is not shown in my FM7.1 pull-down list for "Language" in Paragraph Designer. So even if you obtain/author a script to re-map the document text in the MIF, FM7 will not have any Thai-specific support, including spell check, hyphenation, kerning, etc. If you type "thai" into the forum search, you may get an eyeful on other issues related to Thai.

[Guest]

Thanks for joining in, Error (by the way - what the nickname it is! )

I'll try to clarify what I want to achieve.

All I want to do is to create a MIF 7.0 file from scratch (I'm not actually exporting from MIF10 to MIF7, what I've written in the first post was supposed to be jsut an example outlining the problem) . I already have a script that is doing this, but I ran into troubles after using Thai characters. So, I want to create MIF 7.0 (the  version is essential) file with Thai texts that will be readable in FrameMaker. I'm not interested in any of FM functions regarding it, I just want it to show Thai characters.

[Bob_Niland]

Your Angsana New is likely a Unicode font. When you type Thai characters in it, what goes into the document is 3-byte UTF8 from the U+0E00 codepoint block. These are completely different binary values vs. the 8-bit code page 874 legacy encoding for Thai overlay fonts, and may not even have the same ordering of glyphs in the block.

You're going to need a legacy 8-bit Thai font, possibly Angsana code page 874, and you'll need to know the mapping. On Windows, you'll might even have to type them as Alt sequences, based on the {128-255 decimal?) values of the code points. Alternatively, Windows will have a keyboard mapping for code page 874.

ISO/IEC 8859-11:2001, code page 874 is apparently not the same as TIS-620, if that matters.

Now entering the Unicode parking lot.

Do not back up.

Severe text damage may result.