README
Dai Banna SIL Release 2.200
9 March 2011
===========================

Thank you for your interest in the Dai Banna SIL fonts.  We hope you will find them useful!

Dai Banna SIL is a Unicode Truetype font package containing two font families that provide glyphs for all characters in the New Tai Lue script as used by the Xishuangbanna Dai people in Yunnan, China.  Please read the documentation (DaiBannaSIL.pdf) to see what specific characters are supported.  You will need Adobe Reader version 4 or later to view the documentation.  The reader is available at no cost at
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

Dai Banna SIL is released under the SIL Open Font License.
Dai Banna SIL is a trademark of SIL International.

You may (and are encouraged to) freely share these fonts with your friends and co-workers, but must comply with the terms set forth in the SIL Open Font License.

See OFL.txt and OFL-FAQ.txt for details of the SIL Open Font License.
See FONTLOG.txt for information on this and previous releases.
See DaiBannaSIL.pdf for installation instructions and known issues.

TIPS
====

We cannot afford to offer free technical support.  The font has, however, been through some testing on various platforms to be sure it works in most situations.  In particular, it has been tested and shown to work on Windows XP, Windows 7, and Ubuntu Linux 10.10.  Graphite capabilities have been tested on Graphite-supported platforms.

If you do find a problem, please do report it to <fonts AT sil DOT org>.  We can't guarantee any direct response, but will try to fix reported bugs in future versions.  Make sure you read through the "Known Issues" section in the Dai Banna SIL User Guide (DaiBannaSIL.pdf).

Many problems can be solved, or at least explained, through an understanding of the encoding and use of the fonts.  Here are some basic hints:

Encoding:
The fonts are encoded according to Unicode, so your application must support Unicode text in order to access characters other than the standard Latin alphabet.  Most Windows applications provide basic Unicode support.  You will, however, need some way of entering Unicode text into your document.

Keyboarding:
Dai Banna SIL does not include any keyboarding helps or utilities.  We hope to provide a separate keyboard package in the future.  Meanwhile, if you want to type New Tai Lue characters using the fonts, you will have to do it via "Insert Symbols" in Word, "Insert Special Character" in OpenOffice, or use applications such as Adobe InDesign that can display a glyph palette that shows all the glyphs (symbols) in a font and allow you to enter them by clicking on the glyph you want.

For those who want to venture into keyboard development themselves, the Keyman program (www.tavultesoft.com) can be helpful on Windows systems.  Also available for Windows is MSKLC (http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx).  For Linux systems, KMFL (http://kmfl.sourceforge.net/) is available.  Ukelele (http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele) is available for Mac OS X versions 10.2 and later.

Rendering:
This font is designed to work with the Graphite advanced font technology.  To take advantage of the advanced typographic capabilities of this font, you must be using applications that provide an adequate level of support for Graphite.  See the "Features and Requirements" section in Dai Banna SIL User Guide (DaiBannaSIL.pdf) for examples of such applications.


CONTACT
========
For more information, please visit the Dai Banna SIL page on SIL International's Computers and Writing systems website:
http://scripts.sil.org/DaiBannaSIL

Or send an email to <fonts AT sil DOT org>