Khmer character picker v11.1

Choose a view from the list just below the page title. To produce text in the output area, click on character shapes, or use your keyboard for Latin characters, delete, etc. Then cut & paste the result to your document, or use the buttons to get further information about the characters.

To properly display the text you will need to choose a font that is loaded on your system or device, or use one of the two web fonts downloaded with the page (Hanuman and Suwannaphum). The font list indicates which fonts are standard for Mac (Snow Leopard/Lion) and Windows7, as well as which are the web fonts. Note that the web fonts aren't guarranteed to work on every system/device. For example ,for me, Hanuman worked on my iPad3, but not on my MacBookPro (Snow Leopard). This typically arises because the font relies on rendering algorithms provided by the operating system. See more information about standard OS fonts in Mac and Windows.

You must have JavaScript enabled.

You can also add codepoints and escapes via the "Add codepoint" field (hit return to add to the output field). You can also paste text into the output field to get information about it. Use the yellow boxes to set preferences or search. Regular expressions are allowed when searching – for example, to find characters with the word KA in their name, enter \bka\b, or the short form :ka:.

About the chart

Includes all the characters in the Unicode Khmer and Khmer Symbols blocks (in the default panel).

All text is output in Unicode normalisation form NFC by default. You can change to NFD or no normalisation by clicking on the buttons in the yellow area. Note that normalization only takes place when you click on a character - text pasted into the box won't be normalised until you click on another character above, or click on a button in the yellow area. (Note: normalization is turned off for Han characters in this application.)

Alternative views

The following alternative views are available. You can start up directly in one of the views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, default, shape, huffman, gilbert, phones or fontgrid.

Default This view is likely to be most useful to people who are somewhat familiar with the alphabet and characters of Khmer. Characters are arranged based on the use of the script in order to speed up picking.

Simple consonants are to the left in mostly alphabetic order. To their right are combining characters that follow the initial consonant, then subscript consonants, then vowels and other symbols. Independent vowels appear at the top, then combining vowel signs, then other combining marks. At the bottom are digits and the currency symbol, and various other symbols and punctuation. Clicking on the subscript characters produces a coeng sign followed by a consonant.

Click on the 'Advanced' arrow top right for rare and deprecated characters, as well as divination and lunar characters.

Shape This view is purely based around shape, and is therefore good when you don't know the script well at all, or for shapes you don't know. Characters are grouped and ordered by visual similarity, and include groups of characters that interact to form new shapes. This is not an exhaustive list of shapes in Khmer writing, but may help locate most ligatures and conjuncts you don't recognise.

Each orange key near the top of the page represents a significant part of the shape of two or more characters; as you mouse over the keys, characters and combinations of characters that incorporate that shape are displayed below. Click on these characters to add them to the output. Within a group I attempted to put easily confusable characters close to each other.

The shapes grouped under 'Other' are a mixed bag of characters that didn't fit elsewhere.

You will find similar shapes after any orange plus sign. To the right of the plus sign are characters may cause confusion because they share elements, or because their shape may be similar, though not quite the same..

Transcription I use this for typing in text for which I have a transcription, or for creating phonetic transcriptions. Although the Khmer script is mostly phonetic if you know the rules that underlie it, there are quite a lot of rules. This transcription therefore aims to provide at least 80% of the work needed, and you may need to tweak the remainder.

The large characters on an orange background represent characters in two different transcription systems: one is that used by Huffman in Cambodian System of Writing, another is used by Gilbert and Hang in Cambodian for Beginners. (An attempt has been made to ensure that the phonetic transcription the produced by clicking on characters in both views is the same, but there will be small differences.)

To type Khmer text starting from a transcription, click on these characters. If there is only one Khmer character corresponding to the transcription letter, it is inserted directly into the output field. If there are multiple alternatives, these are presented to you in a selection list: click on the Khmer character you need in the selection list and it is added to the output.

Each Khmer character is associated with a phonetic symbol (a Latin/IPA symbol on white background to its left in the selection lists). If there is more than one possible phonic representation you will see the selection list divided appropriately. In some cases a Khmer character is repeated within the same selection list because it has more than one possible phonetic equivalent - in such cases, choose the right one if you want to generate this phonetic transcription. As you select characters, the phonetic symbol to its left is added to the Phoneme bank area, below the output area.It is quite basic, but is offered as a way of speeding up text entry where you want to type both the Khmer characters and the phonemic transcription. You can edit the text in the phoneme bank, if you wish, and you can move it into the main output area at the current cursor position by clicking on Add.

In a small number of cases, you will need to click twice on the components that make up the sound (eg. when bantoc is used on the following consonant). These cases are indicated by a small red plus sign between two clickable shapes (one of which may be just a hyphen).

When the transcription includes non-written inherent vowels, you can ignore these if you are only interested in the Khmer output. If, however, you also want to obtain a phonetic transcription you have two choices: click on the appropriate Latin letter and select the hyphen from the selection list, or click on one of the Inherent vowel boxes to get the same result more quickly. In either case, nothing will be added to the Khmer text, but a phoneme will be added to the phoneme bank.

For less common characters, switch to the Alphabetic view.

As you mouse over the Latin characters on the grey background, the corresponding Khmer characters are also displayed near the top of the page. This is to aid in searching.

Transcription > Latin This represents the union of all transcription and phonetic characters, and is provided in case you wish to just type in a transcription directly.

Font grid Shows characters in Unicode order, using whatever font is specified in the Font list or Custom font input fields. This allows comparison of fonts (especially useful in IE, which shows if a glyph is missing from a font).

Special commands

Khmer>>IPA The transcription tool is provided as a means for me to generate phonetic transcriptions based on the rules in Franklin Huffman's Cambodian System of Writing. However, it needs some assistance from the user. This is because Khmer doesn't use spaces between words, and it is often ambiguous as to whether a consonant represents a syllable-final sound or a syllable in its own right. It also needs help to identify unstressed syllables. I don't have the means to do automatic word segmentation, so you will need to provide this information.

After the first syllable on the line, put a zero-width space or ordinary space before each consonant or independent vowel sign that begins a new syllable (not word). (Note that this may split consonant clusters. The Khmer text will look strange but still work.) You should also indicate unstressed syllables by following the syllable with a hyphen, rather than a space. For many bisyllabic words, this means putting a hyphen after the first of the two syllables. For example, converting ប្រកាន់និទៀន to ប្រ-កាន់ និ-ទៀន will produce the following transcription [prɑkannitiən]. Note that, if you don't know Khmer well enough to know when a syllable is unstressed, you can still get an approximation to the pronunciation using only spaces (zwsp or ordinary space). For instance, the previous example separated by spaces only will yield [prɑːkanniʔtiən].

If your system supports OpenType fonts, I recommend, for best results, that you install one of the following fonts for viewing the transcription: Doulos SIL, Charis SIL, Gentium. These exceptionally good, free fonts can be found by searching the Web.

Although the transcription is based on rules by Franklin Huffman in Cambodian System of Writing, some symbols are changed to be more recognizable to those familiar with IPA. While the transcription rules are quite detailed, and Khmer is largely regular, there are a few exceptions, particularly in words from Sanskrit or Pali, or ambiguities, for example in a few independent vowel signs, that cause problems for the transcription. The transcription is non-reversible. I created it to help me quickly reproduce (simple) phonetic alternatives for examples in my notes on Khmer.

Other features

For further information about features of the tool or user interface, see How to use.

Useful URIs

Khmer lite, a cut-down version of this picker for handheld devices.

Downloadable TrueType and OpenType fonts: Wazu Japan, Alan Wood

Khmer script notes (my rough notes)

Khmer script description in Wikipedia

Khmer block in UniView

Other pickers

If something is missing

... let me know.