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.