2017-03
The teachers at the primary school in Muang Sing wanted to create Lao Language student worksheets. They wanted the students to substitute the correct Lao Character in a word using the Latin character "x" as a placeholder. They could not find a solution so they asked me for help. I communicated Dr. John Durdin, a Lao font expert, who created a special font for them. Dr. John and I hope that this font can be used throughout the Lao school system and for learning resource publishers in the Lao PDR to create educational material for Lao students.
This font is named Saysettha X It is derived and visually similar to the Saysettha MX font. Download and read the attached pdf file for detailed instructions. Here are the simple instructions. Just download and install the attached Saysettha X.TTF font file. Open your word processor such as Microsoft Word and select Saysettha X from the font menu. Now, whenever you hit the Lao character ຣ on the keyboard it will appear as the Latin character "x". Since the ຣ character is hardly used this substitution should not be a problem. When it is necessary to type the character ຣ just change the font back to Saysettha MX.
As Saysettha X is derived from and (almost) identical to Saysettha MX, it should be understood as an extension to that font for the purpose of entering stand-alone diacritic marks above or below a place-holder base.
Please share this information with your children's teachers and their colleagues.