Talk:Thai typography

A fact from Thai typography appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 19 July 2020 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that some typefaces used in Thai typography are designed to resemble Latin sans-serif, and the Thai characters พ, ร, and บ (pictured in two fonts) may look just like the English letters W, S, and U?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2020/July. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Thai typography.

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Cwmhiraeth (talk) 05:32, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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Thai characters พรบ in two typefaces

... that some typefaces used in Thai typography are designed to resemble Latin sans-serif, and the Thai characters พรบ (pictured in two fonts) may look just like the English letters WSU? Source: "The sans-serif Roman-like Thai typefaces are currently widespread in both appliance and type design. ... However, as single characters, they do not show good performance in visual letter recognition because each may be confused with the original Roman letters. For example, the mimicked characters ‘พ.ร.บ.’ may be confused with the abbreviation ‘W.S.U.’"[1]
- ALT1:... that in some Thai typefaces, the Thai characters พรบ (pictured in two fonts) look just like the English letters WSU?
- ALT2:... that the first printed Thai text was written by an American missionary in Burma, printed in India, then its font brought to Singapore, from where printing was finally introduced to Bangkok? Source: "The first printing in Thai characters was accomplished at Serampore in 1819: a Catechism of Religion that had been prepared by the American Baptist missionary Ann Hasseltine Judson for distribution to a small community of Thai prisoners of war in Burma. In 1823, this Thai font was shipped to Singapore, where the London Missionary Society (LMS) had established a press late the preceding year. ... The ABCFM took possession of the LMS printing establishment in Singapore, and in July 1835 brought it and an old-fashioned press to Bangkok from Singapore."[2]

Reviewed: Hussein Mohammed

Created by Paul_012 (talk). Self-nominated at 05:59, 24 May 2020 (UTC).[reply]

for ALT0 and ALT1. Article is great, although perhaps the references in type anatomy need to be duplicated for the specific features. The only potential issue I see is that ALT0 and ALT1 might not be obvious enough in their clarification. The parenthetical might be better if it fully said (pictured in two Thai fonts) or similar, as otherwise one might assume that the top row of letters are the Latin characters included for comparison if the picture caption is missed. I see what ALT2 is going for, but it's a bit too convoluted as it stands. CMD (talk) 06:40, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks. Modified to read (pictured in two fonts), since the word "Thai" would result in repetition. --Paul_012 (talk) 10:43, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thai abbreviation พ.ร.บ.

The article mentions that the Thai abbreviation พ.ร.บ. looks like the Western abbreviation W.S.U. but fails to mention what the Thai characters in question actually are. I don't understand Thai script and would be interested in knowing what those letters are. JIP | Talk 13:56, 19 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

JIP, I've added an explanatory footnote. --Paul_012 (talk) 04:19, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! JIP | Talk 10:33, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ben Mitchell articles

As a possible place for expanding this article, there's a lot of articles on Thai font design by Ben Mitchell, a British type designer who specialises in Thai, e.g. here, here, here here. Thoughts? I don't know anything about Thai at all. Blythwood (talk) 02:09, 22 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the suggestion. I had actually seen those articles, but was reluctant to use them since it wasn't quite apparent whether Mitchell qualifies as "an established subject-matter expert whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications", a requirement of the reliable sources guideline for self-published blogs to be considered reliable. Also, much of his writing is presented as preliminary observations, which make them unsuitable for supporting statements of fact. (The observations on italic type are very interesting, but I haven't found other sources that would corroborate them.) --Paul_012 (talk) 20:06, 22 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the thoughts! I don't know him, but he has a masters' degree in type design and was hired by IBM to do their Thai fonts, so I'd certainly say you can consider him an established expert if you're happy with including them as sources. Preliminary observations-if they're presented as that honestly-aren't a problem: font design is such a small world (compared to, picking a random example, pop music) that a lot of interesting content is self-published. Blythwood (talk) 20:42, 22 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Serampore

There's a mention of an early catechism printed at Serampore. Surely, this must be at the famous (or infamous, if you prefer) Serampore Mission Press. If this is the case, then maybe linking to that article may be a good idea? – Uanfala (talk) 20:03, 21 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The sources don't explicitly refer to it by name, but I guess the implication is strong enough. I've added a mention. Thanks for the suggestion. --Paul_012 (talk) 21:18, 21 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal to rename this article

As I read it, this article is about type design for Thai script. It is not about typography, which is about designing pages as whole. Typography includes layout, typeface selection, margins, illustrations and so on. So I propose to move the article to "Thai type design". Does anyone have a reason why I should not go ahead? (I will leave this notice until 30 March.) 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 19:24, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. This article covers the subject broadly, ranging from history of printing to typeface evolution to usage considerations ("typeface selection", as you mentioned) and digital text rendering, among other things. These are collectively broader than just type design, which, according to the Wikipedia article, concerns "the art and process of designing typefaces". In other words, I've seen the fields compared this way: "Type designers are ones who create typefaces, typographers are the ones who use them." This article covers them both, and a bit more. The reason it doesn't go into much detail on layout, margins and illustrations is that there's not much there that's unique to Thai text.

From what I've seen, type design is often considered a subfield of typography (see the categories at the bottom of the Type design article), so it seems logical to base the article title on the broader topic, per WP:AND: "Sometimes two or more closely related or complementary concepts are most sensibly covered by a single article. Where possible, use a title covering all cases." If it is to be argued that type design is actually not a subfield of typography, the preferable title would then be Thai type design and typography or Thai typography and type design, per the same guideline: "Where no reasonable overarching title is available, it is permissible to construct an article title using 'and'." I don't have strong opposition to this, but I would like to see first that the position is clearly supported, given the way the Wikipedia categories are currently laid out, as mentioned above. --Paul_012 (talk) 14:08, 21 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, that is valuable response, sufficient to stop Plan A dead. I'm struggling to see any actual typography in the article as it stands? Perhaps this will motivate someone to investigate and contribute.

"Thai type design and typography" would make sense to me, but let's see if anyone else has a comment to make. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 15:40, 21 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@JMF I think aside from posting article renaming proposal on both Talk:Thai typography and Talk:Arabic typography, you should post it to Talk:East Asian typography as well. Jothefiredragon🐲talk🐉edits 05:37, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Done. Consequently, I will delay taking action on any of the three proposals until 15 April. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 08:54, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If further input from the projects doesn't appear to be forthcoming, I think you could go ahead and start a requested move discussion, which might help draw more eyes. --Paul_012 (talk) 06:53, 27 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]