Not so Lao[d], at least not until Vista

Despite progression, the bug calls out to me quite LAOdly

Sorting It All Out — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:01:35 GMT

In the early days of my ownership of the collation functionality, I did have a bit of an inferiority

re: Not so Lao[d], at least not until Vista

Michael S. Kaplan — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 15:41:04 GMT

It is not at all based on Thai. I meant fonts shipping within Windows....

re: Not so Lao[d], at least not until Vista

John Durdin — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 12:30:24 GMT

What does "not too bad" mean? If they have implemented sorting according to the Thai system (which is what I am afraid of, as it is much simpler to write an algorithm for), it will be completely wrong according to accepted Lao usage.

BTW your statement "no (Lao) font until Vista" is not correct - Saysettha OT is a Unicode font that has been around and widely used for several years (e.g. VOA's Lao pages). The OT tables in that font were part of the information provided to MS for their development of Dok Champa.

re: Not so Lao[d], at least not until Vista

Michael S. Kaplan — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 00:35:42 GMT

The algorithm used in Vista is reportedly not too bad (though it is not dictionary based and therefore will not handle loan words).

re: Not so Lao[d], at least not until Vista

John M. Durdin — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:02:13 GMT

Sorting Lao according to the standard Lao dictionary order is phonetic by syllables rather than strictly orthographic, which makes it very different from sorting Thai. The process is: (1) identify syllables, (2) create a sorting key that evaluates syllables, with a priority of initial consonant(s), final consonant, vowel, tone. (A vowel can be several Unicode characters ordered before or after the initial consonant, and displayed anywhere before, after, above and/or below it).

There are many good reasons for this approach being adopted for Lao dictionary sorting (in the 1960s, not recently).

This sorting has been implemented in Lao Script for Windows for many years, and can easily be implemented for SQL server if calls to external DLLs are used to break each string into syllables. (Of course, exceptions such as loan words must be handled, too.)