Thai font for subtitles

  • Hi,

    I'm running libreelec 8.0.1 on Raspberry Pi3:

    I'm trying to display subtitles in Thai, and in Player settings I have set the subtitles language to both English and Thai, and left the 'Font to use for subtitles' as 'arial.ttf', but have set the 'Character Set' to Thai (Window).

    Now, when I try to use http://OpenSubtitles.org/Subscene.com, both find both English and Thai subtitles, but when I select the Thai file, it displays an oblong character for all subtitle characters, obviously not a great deal of use :D

    I suspect I need to install a Thai font file to either add or replace the arial.ttf font file, but have no idea where to look or indeed where to put it :huh:

    Any help greatly appreciated, and thanks in anticipation :cool:

  • put an arrial.ttf with Thai font support in /storage/.kodi/media/Fonts/ and reboot

    I have copied arial.ttf from Windows 11 to that folder on RPi4 with LibreElec 10.0.2 but still no Thai. Only placeholders.

    How can i enable it?

    Thank you!

  • I have copied arial.ttf from Windows 11 to that folder on RPi4 with LibreElec 10.0.2 but still no Thai. Only placeholders.

    How can i enable it?

    Thank you!

    arial.ttf does not support Thai. You are probably looking for arial unicode. I don't remember atm if that bigger Arial (Unicode.odf) variant got Thai code pages. If you start Character Map on Windows 11 (if you can find it in that !@#$ start menu UI), it got search option for Unicode range. Arial on Win11 got no Thai support. Just checked. I don't have Thai support enabled on my Win11 to check which fonts they add to the system to support it. Microsoft Store shows Mitr Light font.

    https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/list/language/thai lists other two fonts.

    More on Thai fonts at https://slice-of-thai.com/fonts/

    Microsoft got page about it too. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typograp…ws_11_font_list

    You need other fonts. Not Arial.

    You are coming from niche language region and you probably know better which fonts support your language than most westerners do.

    Edited 7 times, last by tokul (October 3, 2022 at 4:42 PM).

  • arial.ttf does not support Thai. You are probably looking for arial unicode.

    Thank you, you are right.

    After copying arialuni.ttf to /storage/.kodi/media/Fonts and renaming it to arial.ttf and rebooting the RPi4, Thai subtitles are working now.

    Arial Unicode MS font family - Typography
    Typographic info for the Arial Unicode MS font family
    learn.microsoft.com

    But there are still placeholders for the LibreElec UI (Estuary skin), i. e. pathnames or filenames.

    How can i prevent those placeholders?

    Thank you!

  • Renaming font files won't magically provide fonts, if skin is coded in to use Arial. arialuni.ttf font name differs from arial.ttf and name is set inside the file. System should be selecting any font with code set available in displayed character range. If you were running x86 libreelec with x windows, I would say that you could put fonts in /storage/.fonts and not in /storage/.kodi/media/Fonts. I think rpi arm build does not use x windows and I can't tell how fonts work there.

    Problem with filenames is that you might have them written not in Unicode or in different unicode character set and no fiddling with fonts will fix it. Unless skin is hardcoded to use specific font for filename display. It is computer curse for having fifteen and one standard for character display and no automatic way for telling which character set is used in plain text.

    Edited 2 times, last by tokul (October 4, 2022 at 5:15 AM).