by Richard Wordingham » Mon May 13, 2013 7:04 pm
Can you write computer programs?
If you can, and the programs only contain ASCII and Thai, the solution is to save the files as .rtf or .docx and convert from there.
For RTF, you are likely to find that Thai in DB Thai looks like a whole lot of RTF escape codes such as \'f1. Simply use a global edit to convert them to the escape codes used for Thai. (There might be some issues that you need to convert the RTF specification about; I haven't done such mass conversions.)
A .docx format file boils down to (possibly nested) zip files. If you can, then extract the file and do global edits from 'gobbledegook' (accented Roman characters and a number of symbols) to Thai. In the right environment, you can use iconv to do the conversions. Change the font if you can, and then put the converted file back. It should work, though you may get ignorable complaints about check details not matching. This is what I was reduced to doing with OpenOffice files when I needed to change the character encoding of characters previously not supported by Unicode.
I have a similar page to Glenn's at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/richard.wo ... tis620.htm , but mine does the conversion on the user's computer, and the source code for the conversion is included in the file - it can be run off-line.
If you aren't a programmer, the Abiword word processor might be able to do the conversion for you, at the risk of losing some Word formatting. The wvWare package seems to provide the basic utilities, but it may be easier to use on Linux than on Windows.