Bad Lao Rain

  This is a graphic image of the three characters that make up the Lao word for rain:   This is text rendered by your browser:   This is how it is rendered by Firefox 3.0.16 under Ubuntu Linux 8.04.3 LTS.
   
ຝົນ
 

  1. My Windows XP doesn't support Lao at all.
  2. Whether the three characters are entered as html entities (ຝົນ) or as actual unicode characters (the file being either UTF-8 or UCS-2) the middle character appears as the graphic belonging to ຍ instead of the graphic belonging to ົ.
  3. If the first character is "ອ" (hex 0EA3) then the middle character displays correctly, but if it is "ຝ" (hex 0E93) then it displays incorrectly.
  4. If the first character is in the range 0E90-0E93 or 0E98 that character does not display even though that value as &#...; displays correctly. In these cases, of course, the vowel appears correctly over a missing character.
  5. If the first character is 0E94, 0E95, 0E97, or 0E99 it displays correctly.
  6. If the character is 0E9B or 0E9D it displays incorrectly as shown above.
  7. I have not yet tested other consonants.

Apparently if a Lao unicode character is entered as &#...; then Firefox 3.0 does all right, but if it appears as a native character in the file (legal because of the <meta> tag in the <head> section) then Firefox 3.0 has severe problems.

Other programs under Ubuntu Linux do this test case correctly but have other problems with Lao characters.