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Technical Questions and Answers for Using Thai on Your Computer

Get yourself set up so that you can use Thai in all your computer applications.

How can I read and write Thai email ?
See my Thai Email How To guide, which covers many aspects of receiving and sending email.
How can I convert Thai text files ?
thaiconv is a utility to convert text between various different Thai text formats. You may need this if you send or receive Thai in your email or write Thai documents. thaicheck is a program to check text files have valid letter sequence order. If you type vowels, tone markers or diacritics in the wrong order, this utility can find them for you.
How can I edit Thai text ?
Sontana is a basic text editor with Thai virtual keyboard, designed to make it easy to copy and paste Thai email, edit it, export it etc.
How can I read web pages in Thai ?
This website uses TIS-620 coding for it's pages. TIS is the Thai Institute of Standards. TIS-620 is a convenient system for joining the Thai alphabet with 7 bit ASCII (so called standard ASCII with no "Latin" characters, i.e accents and umlauts).

If the following text: สวัสดี does not look something like this graphic: "" then you will need to change your font to one that has Thai characters. You can find some nice fonts by the Thai Linux Working Group on their ThaiFonts-Scalable project, there are some more at f0nt.com.
Why do I sometimes see Thai fonts with the tone markers and vowels in the wrong place ?
The font you are using has not been rendered correctly, this can happen for several reasons:
1. You are entering TIS-620 coded characters with a Thai font but the application does not know this is Thai. Try changing the character coding of the application or switch to an input method that enters Unicode.
2. You are trying to use a fixed width font in an application that does not understand Thai fixed width fonts. Try changing to a proportional width font.
If none of this succeeds you can copy and paste the text into Sontana (the text editor mentioned above) which should be able to make it readable.