Sontana Tutorial

Selecting a Suitable Font

In this section we discuss setting the font. You are likely to use the same one for some time, so it's important to make a good choice.

1. Choose Font from the Settings menu.
2. Select a Thai font, e.g. Garuda.
3. Choose Thai on the Writing System select widget.

Note: Most Windows PCs have the 'Tahoma' or 'Arial' fonts installed by default. Usually, these fonts contain Thai characters. On Linux 'Gnu Unifont' has Thai letters but the spacing is usually rendered wrong (almost incomprehensible). Download the ThaiFonts-Scalable package from the Thai Linux Working Group. This is an archive of TrueType fonts that are freely available under GPL v2 and can be used with both Windows and Linux.

A Whine about Font Rendering

Fonts in the editor are rendered by the window toolkit, in this case QT, which in turn uses Freetype. In this regard, QT is far from perfect at rendering Thai letters but has improved in recent years. This is out of my control. If you are a little careful about your choice of font then you can easily find one that looks good in most cases, without too many glitches.

I offered to help many times on QT forums, but alas, no one took me up on the offer.

Detailed Font Selection

You can edit the sample window:

1. Type some Thai letters into Sontana.
2. Copy the letters to the clipboard.
3. Open the font selection dialogue.
4. Paste into the Sample area.
5. Select fonts from the list and see the Sample area update.

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