Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources

Test for Unicode support in Web browsers

Lao

U+0E80 – U+0EFF   (3712–3839)

The Lao script is caseless and written left to right, and is used mainly for Lao, the predominant language used in Laos. There are not normally spaces between words, only between sentences. You can find some Unicode Lao text to try at Saysettha OT Sample. You can find out more about Lao Unicode at the Lao Language and Unicode page.

Microsoft Windows incorporates support for Lao Unicode from Windows Vista onwards.

Internet Explorer 5, 5.5 and 6 for Windows and Opera 6 for Windows can display Unicode Lao text. Mozilla and Netscape 7 can also display Unicode Lao text, but they do not allow a preferred font to be selected. Lao Script for Windows allows Unicode Lao to be typed in Word for Windows 97, 2000 and XP with Windows 95, 98 and Me, and in any Unicode-aware application with Windows NT 4, 2000 and XP.

The characters that appear in the “Character” columns of the following table depend on the browser that you are using, the fonts installed on your computer, and the browser options you have chosen that determine the fonts used to display particular character sets, encodings or languages.

You can find some or all of the characters in this range in the Windows Unicode fonts Alice0 MX, Alice1 MX, Alice2 MX, Alice 3 MX, Alice4 MX, Alice5 MX, Arial Unicode MS, Code2000, DejaVu Sans, DejaVu Sans Condensed, DejaVu Sans Mono, DokChampa, JG Basic Lao, JG Chantabouli Lao, JG Lao Old Arial, JG Lao Oldface, JG LaoTimes, Lao Unicode, Phetsarath OT, Saysettha MX, Saysettha OT, Saysettha Unicode, Sun-ExtA, VangVieng MX and XiengThong MX, and in the Unix Unicode font ClearlyU.

To see exactly which characters are included in a particular font, you can use a utility such as Andrew West’s BabelMap, or WunderMoosen’s FontChecker.

If you are not familiar with the characters, you can check the characters displayed here with the graphical display at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0E80.pdf.

The following currency symbol is not in the Lao range:

Copyright © 1999–2012 Alan Wood

The hexadecimal numbers and the character names in the above table are taken from the Unicode 6.1.0 Character Database, Copyright © 1991–2012 Unicode, Inc., as contained in UnicodeData.txt on the Unicode Web site (http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/) in January 2012.

Created 3rd February 1999   Last updated 26th August 2012