Few may know it, but a milestone in the development of Cambodia was passed last month, said Pan Sorasak, a Council of Ministers undersecretary of state and the vice chair of the National Committee for Standardization of Khmer Script in Computers.
After more than two years of work, the committee has created a standard Khmer script for computing that experts say will open a world of new possibilities for Khmer-language applications.
The committee has been working with Microsoft Corp to get the new standard integrated into the next version of Microsoft Office, which includes popular software for Web browsing, e-mail, word processing and Web design, Pan Sorasak said.
With these programs, he said, anyone will be able to write a document, e-mail or Web page that can be read correctly on any new Windows-based computer. He expects to see it on store shelves sometime next year.
Macintosh compatibility is still in the works, Pan Sorasak said.
A standard script makes it possible for the first time to create programs that can correctly format the multiple layers of Khmer lettering, said Pan Sorasak.
In the new programs, he said, characters can be typed in the order in which they are naturally written and will be automatically formatted. The standard includes all Khmer characters, including those used in ancient Khmer script and in astrology and divination.
To test the new software under everyday conditions, the committee last month installed beta versions of it in the offices of the Council of Ministers and the Cambodian Royal Academy, according to a press release.
The next step, Pan Sorasak hopes, will be to encourage programmers to develop open-source, or freely available, routines for simple tasks like text searches, which are very important for Internet compatibility.
Pan Sorasak believes computers and the Internet can become important tools for education and public awareness in Cambodia.
But the fact that the vast majority of Web sites available are in English means for that to happen, Cambodians need to begin developing their own Khmer-language Web sites, he said.
For Web publishing to become widespread, it is important to be able to write in the language easily, and have the results be widely readable and searchable.
The implementation of the new standard will have a downside for some business people who have been making money off of its absence, said Richard McDonough, head of Phnom Penh advertising agency Design Group Cambodia Co Ltd.
His company had found a way to design Khmer Web pages that could be read clearly from any Windows-platform Web browser, he said.
The other obstacle Cambodia faces in developing its own Internet community is the relative scarcity and expense of connecting to the Internet, McDonough said.
Once technology for surfing the Internet over a mobile phone becomes available, he said, he expects the market to take off.
A press release from the standardization committee last month mentioned Khmer mobile interfaces as one of their next projects.
The standard script is part of a system called Unicode, which is established and monitored by a consortium of experts and major computer companies, and is part of nearly every computer and program made.
Unicode, Pan Sorasak explained, is not a font.
“A font is a picture, an image of a script,” he said. “There are thousands of fonts.”
Unicode is the system by which characters are translated into fonts from the machine language computers use to store and transfer information.
Khmer script has been incorporated into Unicode 4.0.
Making Unicode 4.0 was difficult because of the necessity to revise the previous standard, said Pen Sorasak. When the Unicode standard was first being developed in the 1980s, Cambodia was still torn by fighting, and foreign designers created a Khmer character set for Unicode without input from any Cambodian authority.
“It’s completely wrong,” he said.
In the absence of a workable standard, many different Khmer-character fonts and writing utilities have appeared on the Internet; however, they have many defects, the chief being that for two users to share files, both must have found and downloaded the exact same font or program, or else the script will appear as gibberish.
“That’s the most important thing, is sharing information,” said Pan Sorasak. “This is the beginning of the whole history of Cambodia in the Internet era.”
Information about Unicode 4.0 can be found in English at: www.
unicode.org/versions/
Unicode4.0.0
