Creating Lao web pages

The most important points to remember when creating web pages that will include Lao text are:

• As your site may be viewed from mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.) as well as desktop computers (Windows, Mac or Linux), choose fonts that are known to display correctly on all platforms.
• You should always embed the fonts you are using. Do not rely on browsers to have a reliable Lao font available.
• You should generally only use Lao Unicode (OpenType) fonts. With most non-Unicode Lao fonts, browsers will either drop some Lao characters or display them incorrectly, and wrapping of the Lao text at word boundaries may be unreliable.
• Each embedded font should ideally be provided in each of the four commonly used formats (TTF, WOFF, EOT and SVG) for the Lao text to be correctly rendered on all browsers. (Almost all browsers now accept embedded fonts.) Note that SVG format does not support OpenType corrections to fonts, so the rendering of some fonts may not be correct with browsers that only accept SVG format embedded fonts (e.g. some older mobile devices).
• A Lao font for embedding using these formats, with a sample page and stylesheet, can be downloaded from downloads page.
• Some web servers (such as IIS) require each type of file to be downloaded to be enabled separately, so you may need to configure your server when embedding fonts in your web pages.
• The application used to develop your site should be fully Unicode compliant. Not all web-site development applications are fully Unicode compliant, but preparing material in Microsoft Word and copying it using the clipboard can sometimes provide a way around the input limitations of those applications.