I'm working on a major project using the Lao language and InDesign. The Lao text is not flowing correctly in InDesign. There are addons that provide these features (LaoScript), but there isn't native InDesign support, from what I can tell.

Lao text does not seem to properly word wrap. Many professionals use zero-width-spaces in Lao to create invisible 'spaces' between words so that applications properly word wrap. However, this has significant drawbacks and makes it harder for Lao people to use and edit their language because editing text with invisible characters is difficult (especially on mobile, but PCs as well).

As one of the members of the team who helped bring Lao support to ICU (International Components for Unicode), I know that there is support for Lao that doesn't require much work, assuming you all are already using ICU to process text in InDesign. Adobe is listed on ICU's project page as a major user of this library.

So... I would like to request this feature be turned on to properly support Lao text wrapping and word tokenization with non-zero-width-space delimited phrases in Lao.

Here's an excerpt from the Lao Bible:

ເມື່ອພຣະເຈົ້າຊົງເລີ້ມຕົ້ນ (5 words, no spaces, no ZWSPs)

ເມື່ອ ພຣະເຈົ້າ ຊົງ ເລີ້ມ ຕົ້ນ (same 5 words separated by spaces)

I know that there are organizations who swear by ZWSPs (and for good reasons), and do not prefer automatic Lao word tokenization. It might be nice to also provide a mechanism to manually disable this feature for text/frames/documents, assuming the user wants greater control of line breaking in Lao (Thai or Khmer too). But, otherwise, out-of-the-box, have the feature on so that it lowers the barrier of entry for Lao people wishing to use InDesign.

Chrome and LibreOffice are two applications that already support Lao word tokenization out of the box, and more text is available at https://laobible.sea-sda.org if you need some tools/text to test against.

Thanks!