[Fontinst] New LAO encoding for typesetting Lao language

[Morten Hulden]

Hi List,

I recently engaged myself in using LaTeX to produce a PDF document in 
the Lao language. Since I did not find any suitable encoding I felt 
myself forced to write lao.etx, lao.enc, laoenc.def etc files to get the 
work done.

The LAO encoding that I created works with TrueType fonts (converted to 
Type 1) such as Saysettha, Alice, XiengThong etc, where the Lao 
characters are in the Unicode range 0x0e80-0x0eff and ligatures for tone 
mark and vowel combinations are in the Unicode private range starting at 
0xE000.

There are still some small things to do on the kerning of the tone marks 
and vowel signs, but these may be font specific so I did not put more 
than necessary (ie ligatures) into the etx-file.

I am using tetex from the Fedora 5 distribution. I had to add the Lao 
chars to tex/latex/unicode/data/uni-14.def and also add a lao.ucf file 
in order to get things to work.

Now the question for the list (is this the right list, by the way?):
I did all this to produce one single document and I will soon forget the 
details of my work. Pity. So should I, or rather, how can I submit the 
files I added or changed to the TUG community so others can benefit from 
them.

rgds
Morten

PS I don't know the Lao language, I just did this as part of a project I 
am involved in