Our previous support for this script was called the Dehong Dai Language Kit but
we’ve changed the name of our kit to reflect actual usage. The
underlying language goes by lots of different names depending
on a speaker’s location (Laos, Thailand, China, Myanmar) but
“Tai Le” is the native designation while “Dehong Dai” is the
Chinese language term. Since there are also several different
typestyles used and the one supported here is used predominantly
in China and Thailand, we use the native designation in the current
version: Tai Le Language Kit.
The Tai Le script doesn't require any fancy typographic features so it’s compatible
with just about any application that recognizes Unicode input.
It does however have two orthographic versions — an older one that uses ‘combining’ diacritics for tone marks (even though they don’t always ‘combine’) and the modern one
which uses spacing tone characters or letters. The graphics above
illustrate the latter version but our kit supports both through
the use of font features that can be accessed via the Typography
palette available to most applications.
The Tai Le Language Kit from XenoType Technologies includes both font variants shown above and one keyboard layout. We are not
aware of any Tai Le keyboarding standards so our keyboard driver
is based on a phonetic method.