Introduction / Prolog

➜ If someone had mentioned to you some fifteen years ago that the production of Thai fonts could be carried out as a business, you might have scoffed at the idea for you could have thought it impossible. In fact, a person with that vision would have been quite remarkable in an age when most people did not know what a font is. Back then fonts, typography and type design were esoteric subjects in Thailand, known to only a very small group of people.

If we were to look back even farther, say, twenty years – to the period before the arrival of the personal computer – the idea of font businesses was virtually non-existent. The young designers of today, who have grown up alongside digital typography, might have difficulties picturing a world where fonts were anything other than marketable commodities.

During the nascence of desktop publishing, Thai electronic fonts were regarded as a mere marketing gimmick to help boost personal computer sales. Some pundits regarded digital fonts as a significant change in format for the typesetting industry. But in fact font design in Thailand had been evolving into a new industry even before the advent of desktop publishing. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm of the small core of type designers at the time had been severely dampened by unfavorable developments in the business, notably the lack of standardized code of practice in regard to font ownership and licensing. As a result of the discouraging business climate, font design as a profession has largely been neglected, it being restricted to only a small group of independent font foundries.

There are other factors that have compounded to slow the growth of the Thai font industry. Dating from the 1980s and 1990s, advances in digital typography have yet to receive the encouragement of authorities at the national level. This lack of support has been due to the lack of understanding on the part of Thailand’s decision makers; very few of whom are able to envision the role digital typography plays in the nation’s development of effective communications and information processing. This is hardly surprising given the fact that typography is but a small portion of the IT sphere whose development is only beginning to receive the attention of development authorities.

A case in point to illustrate how uninformed decisions can kill off good ideas is the story many years ago of the attempt to replace the old Thai-Language keyboard, the so-called Kedmanee layout, with a new improved layout called Patachote. The latter layout had won significantly over the old one, scoring a whopping 26% improvement in various speed tests conducted by the National Research Institute. Despite its proven performance, the new keyboard did not receive the blessing of the National Institute of Industrial Standards which went on to announce the old layout as the national standard. A trivial case, perhaps. But if we are to think about the sum total of all the tiny increments in speed, about how information could have moved a little faster, across the nation and over the span of three decades, just how much further development could we have achieved? With incidences such as this, it is small wonder why we had to face the problems of poor standardization, such as the recent snags with Unicode font designation, or other problems in regard to data inputting and storage practices.

A typeface’s role straddles the spheres of art and communication. For a user simply requiring to transmit information, he may just opt for any plain font to do the job of forming symbols or text. Users in this category tend to regard fonts as mere software for generating strings of characters. For a designer, however, a font is more than just verbal representations; it is capable of conveying emotive feelings. In this sense, it is art. With the widespread use of computers today, fonts are doing a great job of bridging these two spheres as users can now pick a font they like to convey the look and feel of their textual data.

The past decade has seen a significant revival of interest in Thai font design which has progressed alongside advances in digital font technologies. Also subject to change were local prejudices and beliefs that have more or less dictated type design in the past. Some of these are discussed below.