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HOWTO: Type IPA diacritics in Word with Thai enabled

NOTE: This archived documentation has not been updated recently and may contain information that is no longer relevant

Symptoms

Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007 block some combinations of diacritics on Latin letters when Thai is selected as the Installation Language. This can result in strange behaviour in Keyman, including unexpected deletion of other characters.

Example

For example, using the Keyman SIL IPA keyboard as follows, if Thai is selected as the Installation Language:

1. Check that the language of the selected range is English (U.S.) (this shows that the issue is not specific to Thai language text).
2. Type the combination æ` (U+00E6 U+0300). You can type this with Keyman SIL IPA Unicode keyboard with “a<@1”.
3. The diacritic is silently swallowed.

The selected combination is used as an example, but many others fail equally.

Workaround

Set the installation language to English or some other European language. The Installation Language can be changed in the "choose the language that defines default behavior in Microsoft Office applications", in Microsoft Office Language Settings, under Microsoft Office Tools in the Start Menu.

Update (April 2008): Further research indicates that this problem may occur in Office 2007 if any complex script language (such as Hindi or Bengali) is installed. This problem can only be resolved by unselecting support for these languages in Office 2007. This issue has been reported to Microsoft for resolution.

Applies to:

• Keyman 5.0
• Keyman 6.0
• Keyman 6.2
• Keyman Desktop Corporate 7.0
• Keyman Desktop Light 7.0
• Keyman Desktop Professional 7.0