Free Download Khmer Fonts

Out of the thousands of fonts available for free download, Khmer fonts are easier to find than you'd think. While you'll need to adjust your keyboard, high-quality Khmer fonts are just a click away.

Professor Gerald Difflot and Sokhoum Khek developed the first Khmer font for the computer in 1984 for the Apple Macintosh computer. They developed for Mac because of the advantages of Apple's computer structure over the IBM computers of the time. The Mac offered support of more than 128 characters in a font and easily accessible control from the keyboard. The issues of speed and adaptability went on until the release of Windows 3.0, which included the Adobe Type Manager software, which was fast and flexible enough to support the Khmer fonts.

The Khmer fonts were adapted to the QWERTY keyboard layout by putting characters up in each corner of each key. There are particular difficulties in creating Khmer words on the computer, as the language consists of clusters of words, not of characters. Today you can actually order keyboard overlays from companies that use the common KHEK layout for Khmer-capable computers.

KHEK is not necessarily a standard – other Khmer fonts have also been created, such as the Limon Font and the Zero-Space Font. In Cambodia, the National Information Communications Technology Development Authority (NIDA) along with the Khmer Software Initiative has developed an open source initiative to let all Unicode-based fonts work with the Khmer language. Khmer Unicode currently works with the following applications:

• Windows XP (Khmer Unicode Keyboard driver required)
• Open Office
• Open SUSE (a linux based operating system)
• Khmer Email App (based off of the popular Thunderbird email application)
• Mehkala Web Browser (based on Firefox)

The government of Cambodia even maintains its own web page to assist people in installing and using Khmer on their computers. The page includes free download Khmer fonts in the Limon and ABC Zero-Space styles.

Like many fonts, "free" is not always "good". However, since Khmer fonts have been around for many decades, there are many new resources and places to acquire them. The advantage of purchasing the font from somewhere such as Khek Brothers is that you can purchase supporting materials, such as the key covers or even Khmer keyboards, as well.

At the same time, the web is full of individuals who simply want to share the wealth of knowledge. Phirun maintains a Tripod page which includes downloads of 25 Khmer fonts in one package, as well as the Limon fonts, a diagram of the keyboard layout, and directions for changing your QWERTY keyboard. This is all "Distributed freely in order to contribute to the preservation of Cambodian culture," according to the page.

However, since Microsoft released an entire whitepaper on developing Khmer Script for Open Type Fonts in 2002, many more aspiring fontographers have developed their own fonts. Some of these are available at various font repositories such as U+Fonts.

However, these fonts do not have the solid backing of reputable companies such as Khek Bros. or the Cambodian government. Downloading them runs the risk of several things:

• Some of the font packages could contain viruses or malware.
• Some of the fonts may be copyrighted and illegally distributed on the site
• Some fonts may be more limited in their character sets than those created by professional fontographers.

In short, use these fonts at your own risk. The advantage of these kinds of sites is that they do give a good preview of the font appearance along with a description of what the download is supposed to contain.

On current operating systems, installing fonts usually is as easy as double-clicking on the font package. However, consult your computer's help section for explicit directions if you need further assistance.

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