Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources

Test for Unicode support in Web browsers

Thai

U+0E00 – U+0E7F   (3584–3711)

The Thai script is caseless and is used mainly for Thai, the predominant language used in Thailand. You can find some real Unicode Thai text to try at Microsoft Thailand, at the sites of the Daily News and Thai Rath newspapers, and on the What is Unicode? in Thai page.

Microsoft Windows incorporates support for Unicode Thai from Windows 95 onwards, either as part of the operating system or as an extension for Internet Explorer 5. Users of Internet Explorer 5 for Windows can choose to install Thai Language Support, which allows you to view Thai Web pages and adds Thai support to some other applications.

For users of Mac OS 9, a Thai Language Toolkit is available; it costs 500 Baht and is available from Apple dealers in Thailand, including some in Panthip Plaza on Petchaburi Road in Bangkok, or by mail order from Thai Toolkit software for Apple Macintosh. It allows you to type, read and print Thai in various programs, and to view Thai Web sites using iCab, Mozilla or Netscape 7.

Mac OS X incorporates support for Unicode Thai from version 10.2 onwards.

The Thai Industrial Standards Institute has defined an 8-bit standard for encoding Thai characters – TIS-620. Plain text files with this encoding can be converted to Unicode and encoded as UTF-8 by using the Tis2Utf8 converter, which runs a Perl script.

The characters that appear in the first column 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, Angsana New, AngsanaUPC, Arial Unicode MS, Browallia New, BrowalliaUPC, Caslon, CN-Arial, Code2000, Cordia New, CordiaUPC, Courier MonoThai, DilleniaUPC, DokChampa, EucrosiaUPC, Fixedsys Excelsior, Free Idg Serif, Free Monospaced Thai, Free Serif, FreesiaUPC, Garuda, IrisUPC, JasmineUPC, KodchiangUPC, Leelawadee, LilyUPC, Loma, Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans, Lucida Sans Typewriter, Microsoft Sans Serif, NFT-Norasi, Norasi, Purisa, Quivira, Saysettha MX, Sun-ExtA, Tahoma, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, VangVieng MX, XiengThong MX and Zawgyi-One; in the Macintosh OS X Unicode fonts Ayuthaya, Krungthep, Lucida Grande, Sathu, Silom and Thonburi; and in the Unix Unicode fonts Caslon and 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/U0E00.pdf.

Copyright © 1999–2010 Alan Wood

The hexadecimal numbers and the character names in the above table are taken from the Unicode 3.0 Character Database, Copyright © 1991–1999 Unicode, Inc., as contained in UnicodeData-Latest.txt on the Unicode ftp site (ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/) in October 1999.

Created 3rd February 1999   Last updated 12th January 2010