There are two ways to type Lahu: the Thai way and the Chinese way.

The Chinese way is a lot easier, because it uses only English letters. The Thai way of typing Lahu uses characters that were not even in Unicode (the international standard which has over 100,000 letters and characters) when we started the project. These special characters, which are used to indicate tone (or pitch), were supposed to be added this past July.

Here is the Thai way (English on top line):

Here is the Chinese way (Chinese on top line):

Tech Speak:

In computing, Unicode is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in tandem with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, Unicode consists of a repertoire of about 100,000 characters, a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case, a set of reference data computer files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for text normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic or Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts). http://www.unicode.org/standard/principles.html#What_Characters