Much thanks to SIL and all their hard work on improving (and fixing) the code for LibreOffice allowing it to correctly and automatically break Khmer words without the user having to insert zero-width spaces manually. If you are interested in trying it out yourself visit the nightly builds for LibreOffice here and download the version for your operating system: LibreOffice Nightly Builds
You can also access the source code of the automatic word breaker for Khmer at GitHub here.
The source is based on frequency dictionaries of Khmer words with probability counts as well as a long list of names and places in Khmer.
9 Comments. Leave new
which nightly build version
Any of these will work: http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/master/
Is it possible to extend the work already done to create a tool that adds zero-width spaces to a block of text? Then this solution could be applied independently of LibreOffice (or text could be taken out of LibreOffice and used in, say, LaTeX.
Yes, it is possible, but we don’t currently have a volunteer with the skills needed to make it happen.
how does it work? we just open the document and it automatically insert zero-width spaces between words? or do we click on something?
Hello Boran,
LibreOffice will automatically break Khmer words (you won’t be able to tell except on line-breaks). You can also add your own zero-width-spaces if you want to control it manually.
Hello Nathan Wells, I find that you help us very much on Khmer typing, by the way I still can’t see zwsp in my article in LibreOfficeDev 6.2. First, I wrote my article in Libre, and copy, paste into my WordPress and I view in Firefox, there is no result, no zwsp in it! https://tvsiemreap.com/2018/07/16/uncategorized/301/
I failed with zwsp! Can you help me how to add automatically zwsp in khmer article?
Yes, the zwsp is added automatically but you cannot see it. If you want to export to another program you have to insert the zero-width spaces manually.
How to do that?