“Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“You sure? We have to send the artwork to the printer by noon.”
“As soon as I get the updated font, it’ll be a piece of cake. I just have to replace the old font with the new one, edit a few things here and there, then it’s done.”
The two young Thai graphic designers stared at their computer screen, admiring their first commercial work, beautifully crafted with excellent use of grid and type. They had been spending days and nights just to get the details right. It was nearly finished, except for some technical difficulties beyond their expertise. Every time they inspected their work, they could still see all the misplaced tone marks across the document. These little characters weren’t behaving the way they supposed to and the designers were unable to resolve it. Their only hope was to call the font foundry.
“Great! And when will he send you the font?”
“By noon.”
The problem our two young designers faced is quite common among Thai design studios or any companies employing type seriously. Outwardly, the Thai characters we see and use everyday on our computer appear complete, enough to compose any Thai word in existence. It is, however, not enough for fine typographic treatment. To better understand this issue, it may be helpful to imagine how Latin characters are treated by designers and typesetters. When you browse through a professionally published book, you don’t see hyphens used instead of en-dashes, dumb quotes instead of smart quotes, three periods instead of ellipses, and other fine details being misused. Each character has a purpose to serve. Even tiny variations matter, such as the difference between the length of em-dashes, en-dashes, and hyphens.
Thai tone marks, vowels, and signs fall into the same category as there are different sets used for different character combinations. Each set appears slightly different from one another, just like the length of the dashes. Unfortunately, these characters when improperly treated can distort the language to a much greater extent. It becomes an issue of legibility, pronunciation, and communication.
Take the word, ป่า (pronounced: par), for example. It is composed of Po Pla (ป), Sara Aa (า), and a tone mark, Mai Ek ( ่). This word, when correctly treated, means ‘forest’. The problem, however, is the position of Mai Ek. Normally, when Mai Ek, or other tone marks, are used with characters without ascenders, it is automatically and rightly placed above the rightmost stem of its corresponding character e.g. บ่่า. But when there is an ascender as in the word, ‘forest’, Mai Ek must be shifted a little to the left to avoid an overlap of characters, which in this case would result in a totally different word, ปา (pronounced: par; but with a slightly higher tone), meaning ‘to throw’. In writing, this isn’t problematic since we were taught to vary the placement of tone marks depending on character combinations and we could do that easily with our pen. The computer’s treatment of such a case, though, requires another character of Mai Ek, one that has an offset position. Unfortunately, like an abandoned child who got kicked out of the house, this Mai Ek’s twin brother does not have a designated Unicode character code.
There are a total of 27 characters including tone marks, vowels, and signs that falls under this circumstance. Typographers tried hard to conceal the problem so it would be easier on the users. They do this by utilizing the Private Use Area (PUA). But the PUA is meant to be used for organizations and corporations to create non-standard and special characters for their own private purposes, not to solve a legibility or language problem. Any character of any typeface in any language can camp here to their heart’s content. Then sooner or later, the 27 siblings might just be kicked out of their temporary shelter. Nevertheless, they will eventually charge back in to perform their role. Because they exist for a purpose.
Of course, this is a very crude way of solving the problem as the fix is not permanent. Apart from individual typographers trying to find a solution, organizations such as Microsoft and Linotype also provide alternatives. Theoretically, Microsoft Visual OpenType Layout Tool (VOLT) does its job by generating a center mark for the problematic characters and offsetting it to the desired position. Practically though, it doesn’t work, at least not for our language. On the other hand, Linotype creates ligatures to resolve those unsettling character combinations. This method is also widely employed by Thai typographers.
Basically, we have at least three solutions for the same problem, but none of them are ideal. In fact, they further complicate the issue. The question is, shouldn’t there be a simpler, more universal solution? What we currently have are merely workarounds. We tried to tackle the problem, but only superficially, and its root remains intact. In a way, this is troublesome. We are dealing with language, a representation of culture, not just some temporary signs and symbols.
Information is undoubtedly shifting into the digital realm and people are beginning to type more than they write. And it’s quite pathetic to see language used incorrectly in professional publications and communications. Workarounds don’t always work and typographers aren’t always there to do the magic. Obviously, once or twice isn’t such a big deal, but when this improper typographic treatment becomes increasingly frequent, it evolves into a literacy issue.
Computers are one of the best learning tools ever created and there are people who literally take it as the ‘standard’. Just like how a typed contract is more believable than a written one, the visual structure of a computer type appears more ‘correct’ than anything that comes off a pen. And some people, without proper knowledge of typography, consider the outputs of a computer faultless, even with all those 27 misplaced characters. Sad but true.
Last but not least, there is the issue of time. Once a user encounters this sort of problem, he would probably call the foundry he purchased the font from. Sometimes, they will get it fixed quickly, but this is not often the case as it is possible to take hours or even a day to have this resolved. Why? Because it may not be as simple as sending the user a new version of the font. Some applications may need to be additionally installed, updated, or even downgraded. The typographer responsible may be in a serious meeting and couldn’t pick up the call. The assistant designer may have gone to the toilet, apparently having diarrhea. The secretary who responds may know as much about the technical details of type as she does about the origin of the universe. These little scenarios may sound silly but they are more than probable.
As a matter of fact, it shouldn’t be such a headache in the first place. We already have our fair share of problems, whether they are social, political, business, educational, or personal. The improper treatment of those 27 characters might just be some tiny bits that kept falling on our head to irritate us. But we shouldn’t look at it as a standalone issue as we would probably ignore it like many other problems of this country. Observing it relatively, we can see it is, more or less, chained to communication, time, money, language, culture, etc. And when we think of it in these terms, it doesn’t seem exclusively typographic anymore, but rather what we experience everyday in our work and life. Now, that is quite discomforting…for something that shouldn’t be a problem.
It was a bright sunny morning, but for most people, it’s just another day of work. Like any other day, they would spend their time staring at a screen with their fingers obviously typing away on the keyboard. Some worked on their reports while others prepared their presentation. The young ones would try their best to capture the attention of their seniors, perhaps by naively setting their report in an eye-catching font. But unlike them, our young designer sat on his sofa, enjoying a cup of espresso while scanning through a magazine. Such leisure time was rare, but he finally found it after a month of hard work. His studio was fairly quiet as he was the only one there. Just when he was about to take his final sip of caffeine, his colleague rushed in.
“Hey, buddy! We got the proofs.”
“Terrific!”
“Terrible!”