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The Arrival of Khmer Fonts
When we first introduced the Khmer fonts on the Apple Macintosh in 1985, many users often asked us as to why not developing the Khmer fonts for the IBM PC as well? The question had a lot of relevance to it because Macintosh had just come out into the market and it was a very expensive machine. On the other hand, IBM PC were already saturated the market. There were many IBM users who would love to use the new software.
Well the reason was at the time when Khmer fonts for the Apple was sold in the market, Microsoft Windows for IBM lacked the speed and keyboard interface which were needed for the Khmer software. So we planned to refine our font design on the Macintosh and in the meantime hoped that technology will permit us to eventually market our software on IBM as well. Thank heaven, Windows 3.0 came to the rescue. With the release of version 3.0, the Windows environment now could support the Khmer fonts by using the font driver ATM (Adobe Type Manager).
Our users were delighted when we announced the new software. But then there were numerous comments as to why we did not develop the IBM PC keyboard layout exactly the same as the Macintosh. Once again, software technology has not caught up with neither the font developer (us) nor the users.
After years of waiting and researching, there was a software development kit which enables us to design an exact keyboard layout as the Apple Macintosh. And more, yes, now our users can even transfer text documents from Apple to IBM PC, a break through for us and the Apple-IBM PC users. Concurrently Microsoft released Windows version 3.1 into the market which has a built-in TrueType font technology; the same technology that is used by Apple Macintosh System version 7.0.
To summarize, our Khmer font documents now can be transferred from IBM PC to Macintosh and vice versa with true compatibility. In addition the two computers share the same keyboard layout configuration, the KHEK layout since 1985.
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