Quick response on the input methods:

I have installed an onscreen Thai keyboard on my iPhone for a few years now, which was mostly an annoyance as I could never figure out how to get back to the qwerty layout if I engaged it by accident!

Very simple to use though, and meant most of my early experience was restricted to using my phone!

I have been doing some copy/paste to get Thai characters into text buffers on my Macs, but that is totally impractical other than when critical to typing up an example. I never got the hang of entering code points manually.

In my most recent trip to Thailand I finally picked up a Thai Bluetooth keyboard. The layout is qwerty, with the Thai letters overlaid on the keys, with a bonus key to switch between Latin and Thai letters. Thai has 80 letters, plus some other accents, and but no upper/lowercase so the shift key serves to give access to the less frequently used letters.

So far, the hard part is learning the Thai layout, and trying to not expect the Thai letter to be on the equivalent qwerty key. For example, ‘ม’ maps to the ‘,’ key and not the ‘m’ key, as obviously the Thai layout is designed around frequency in the Thai language.

So still at the extremely slow “hunt and peck” typist speed, but hoping that will improve with practice.

AlisdairM
อลิสแดร์ม
Sent from my iPhone

> On Dec 15, 2023, at 22:03, Tom Honermann <tom_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> That sounds like a great project! Please share what you learn in addition to asking any questions!
>
> One of the things I would like to hear about is the process of typing Thai text. Did you get a Thai keyboard? Or are you using a key map? Or using an on screen keyboard?
>
> Likewise, please share the kind of text processing you end up doing. It would be great to understand how that processing maps to Unicode algorithms and any tradeoffs you encounter with regard to efficiency vs ergonomics.
>
> Tom.
>
>> On Dec 12, 2023, at 5:45 PM, Alisdair Meredith via SG16 <sg16_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>
>> Just a heads-up for an ongoing personal experiment that may end up with me
>> coming back here to ask dumb questions!
>>
>> I am in the process of teaching myself to read and write Thai, and at some point
>> I am going to want to start processing Thai text on my Mac. When that fateful
>> day comes, I expect I will be running headlong into a lot of questions that Unicode
>> has answers for, not necessarily good answers, and I will be trying to make them
>> work through C++.
>>
>> I expect I will come with a lot of learner questions that will highlight usage that may
>> (or may not) inform some of the papers this group is writing, if only by providing
>> examples.
>>
>> I do not plan to write papers myself, but if I ask odd enough questions you might point
>> out when I stumble into one that is worth writing up.
>>
>> I will try to keep the dumb questions out, and focus only on trying to represent my
>> newfound knowledge through Unicode and C++.
>>
>> AlisdairM
>> --
>> SG16 mailing list
>> SG16_at_[hidden]
>> https://lists.isocpp.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/sg16
>