I’m designing a font for Laos. Lao does not put a space between words, so in a paragraph of text, the computer doesn’t know where it can start a new line. Instead, it breaks at random and often inappropriate spots. Somehow, the typist needs to be able to say “You can break the line here.”
The best solution I can think of is to use the hyphen key for this purpose. I’ve deleted the glyph, so that the “hyphen” has no width and no glyph. A typist can put a hyphen between words. On most software, the computer will then do a line return if it’s needed, otherwise nothing is visible.
Is this likely to cause any problems that I can’t foresee right now? Or is there a better way to achieve this goal?
The way that you’re doing it may work, and may be the easiest, but the right way is to use the Unicode mappings for Lao. This is a PDF Code Chart for Lao from Unicode.org.
I have created and edited fonts for Burmese using only the ANSI character set, as you are trying to do for Lao. It is OK but has its problems and limitations.
Using Unicode may limit the number of applications that will support the font properly. Word or Open Office should manage alright.
The hyphen character may be needed for use with numbers and dates. It might be better to use the soft hyphen ANSI 173. Most applications can insert that with Control hyphen. The proper character to use is a zero width space, but as I have no experience in creating Unicode fonts for Asian scripts, I don’t know the right method for typing with these fonts. Adding the zero width space is simple.
You can download some Unicode fonts for Lao from Alan Wood’s pages and open them in Font Creator to see how they are created. I had a quick look at “Saysettha OT” — it includes the zero width space, and has Open Type features. You need to use another program (VOLT) to add Open Type features, as Font Creator doesn’t support that yet. Open Type information is preserved by Font Creator, but cannot be added.