Many different types of Lao fonts have been created for use with Windows applications. Some widely-used, older Lao fonts (such as SengChanh, alice_0 just replaced the English (Latin alphabet) characters by the Lao characters that use the same typewriter keys, but in many applications, that caused serious incompatibilities.
Other Lao fonts (such as Saysettha Lao) included most English characters at the usual code-points, and added Lao characters in the "upper ASCII" range of 8-bit characters. However, unlike Thai, no 8-bit coding standard for Lao was ever adopted or supported by Microsoft or application developers, so Lao text will not always be displayed correctly with these fonts.
Most recent Lao fonts follow the Unicode standard for Lao, which is fully supported by Microsoft and almost most applications. LaoScript 8 includes a number of Lao Unicode fonts, and uses Unicode standard encoding by default, but still supports the use of fonts using the LSWin (Saysettha Lao) coding. LaoScript 8 can also convert Lao text in documents from older coding conventions to Unicode, replacing the non-standard fonts by standard Unicode fonts in those documents.
For more information on fonts and related issues, please see: