Thai font missing in Leopard (Lucida Grande)

The system just chose the other font that comes with it, Thonburi, which looks okay (well, not good) but the problem is that it doesn't have bold or italic typeface at all.

Lucida Grande does not have italic typeface either. Thonburi is now the system default for Thai, but OS X also as other Thai fonts (Silom, Krungthep, Ayuthaya, Sathu) you can use. Is there something special about the Lucida Grande Thai other than bold typeface?

You may also be able to use other Thai fonts like those at

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Thai.html

but whether diacritics are always placed correctly I have not tested yet.

Not to mention problems displaying Thai in Mail.app, Pages, Keynote, Numbers and TextEdit just because of the change of the font.

What "problems" do you mean exactly? Thai still displays in all those apps correctly, does it not?

Apple, please fix this!

To tell Apple you want this back, use the feedback channel (only other users will see it here).

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Thanks for that link, very useful! Certainly the backspace problem has nothing to do with the font. Also I don't understand the "italic" issue, because as far as I can see you cannot do italics with Lucida Grande either, so going back to that font will not solve it. The "bold" issue is clear, and I don't see why Thonburi does not have both regular and bold as it says it should in the font panel. I will try to run some tests myself to see whether the other problems are caused by the font or bugs in the OS and apps.

I understand what you mean because I used to have to do desktop publishing in Thai, amongst many other languages.

The problem with the backspace not jumping the whole character including the diacritics on top is due to the diacritics being separate characters. After all the diacritics change the character in more complicated ways than the way they do in the more limited Latin alphabet.

Have you tried using Microsoft's Thai fonts? They produce excellent sets which are very attractive and have all the bolds and italics, which because of their absence in the Mac fonts makes life unnecessarily difficult if not impossible.

How does OSX handle the problem of no wordspaces in Thai? This was one of the more difficult aspects of using Thai in Mac OS9.

I find it very strange that Apple has removed a feature of Lucida Grande (Thai support) in Leopard.

Is this yet another example of Apple's subtle undermining of users' ability to get their work down with every version of OSX?

Bold is very important,

I transplanted the Thonburi Bold font from Leopard to Tiger and it works there (though it is not as dark as Lucida Grande). So I guess there is a bug in Leopard that doesn't recognize that font -- they should definitely fix that.

But the backspace issue is very important as it confuses a lot of users.

Yes, that is a bug in the webkit text engine I think.

Cut-off text in Mail is presumably a Mail problem.

It looks to me like the spacing issue is definitely the fault of Thonburi, and I think this is a strong argument for going back to Lucida Grande (unless Apple wants to redo Thonburi spacing). Perhaps they did not see this problem because many people have their apps set to Lucida Grande or Helvetica or Times by default and Latin text will use that automatically, even when Thai uses Thonburi.

I think a lot of people have placed their complaints through that feedback page.

That's good.

How does OSX handle the problem of no wordspaces in Thai?

OS X has a Thai dictionary which is supposed to help ensure correct line-breaking behavior. MS Office for Mac does not use this and thus does not yet fully support Thai input.

I find it very strange that Apple has removed a feature of Lucida Grande (Thai support) in Leopard.

Lucida Grande's support for Arabic was removed in Tiger, the default becoming Geeza Pro. I think everyone found this a vast improvement. Apple probably thought they were doing the same for Thai in Leopard.

PS Has anyone tried replacing the Leopard Lucida Grande with Tiger's and deactivating Thonburi? Or even just putting the Tiger version in your Home/Library/Fonts so you can use it if you want?

I just did what you suggested and Font Book reported that there's font duplication. I tried deleting the Leopard's one but it doesn't let me. It just automatically replaces the font. I guess I probably have to do it through Target Disk Mode. We'll see.

Yes, trying to replace a system font can be tricky, especially Lucida Grande which is critical to the OS operation. Another track would be to use FontForge to add Thai back into Leopard Lucida Grande, but that is probably also not easy. Yet another would be to disable Thonburi and try putting another Thai font that has the right bold and spacing characteristics into System/Library/Fonts.

Here is a possible fix: I downloaded another set of Thai fonts (Garuda) and used FontForge to change their names to Thonburi. Then I removed Apple's Thonburi and put in my set. It seems to work.

PS I have put a set of the Garuda fonts renamed Thonburi on my iDisk (the folder Garudathonburi) in case anyone wants to test them:

http://idisk.mac.com/thgewecke-Public?view=web

For those of you not in the US, today is one of our biggest holidays, Thanksgiving. I'm thankful that there are awesome people like Tom Gewecke out there to help us all communicate. Thanks Tom and Happy Thanksgiving.

Thanks for the iDisk files, but Word would not recognize the thonburi.tff base font. The other 3, fine, but not that one. For some reason, all my Thai fonts got dumped during the Leopard install. I did just pull the Loma font off the web and that one works fine with Word. Any idea what I might try to get Word and that thonburi.ttf file to play nicely?

Where else will this Lucinda/Thunburi issue show up other than those who've used the Lucinda font in Word? Will the OS be looking for the thonburi.ttf font in some instances, thus without it, will not display thai script correctly? Mail?