Thai typewriter

First Thai typewriters '' for the Smith Premier typewriter dealership, then held at George B. McFarland's dental practice Following the introduction and popularization of typewriters in the West in the 1880s, the first Thai typewriter was developed by Edwin Hunter McFarland, a Thai-born son of American missionary Samuel G. McFarland. In 1891, Edwin took leave from his work as a secretary to Prince Damrong Rajanubhab (then Minister of Public Instruction) to work with type-cutters in Syracuse, New York, to modify the recently introduced Smith Premier typewriter for Thai characters. Edwin McFarland died in 1895, leaving the typewriter business to his younger brother George B. McFarland, a medical doctor who was by then head of the Royal Medical College at Siriraj Hospital. In 1897, George established a Smith Premier dealership on Charoen Krung Road (on the corner of Unakan Intersection in the area now known as Wang Burapha), and the business flourished, importing and selling thousands of units over the next few years alone. By the 1910s, it was being used in government offices all over the country, as well as many private businesses. Switch to shift layouts , . The school was among the first institutions to systematically train its students in touch typing. During this time, the Smith Premier brand had been acquired by the Remington Typewriter Company, who in 1915 discontinued the production of double-keyboard models, which were unsuited for touch typing. This adversely affected Thai users. Remington supplied McFarland with a replacement model that utilized a shift layout, but it was spurned by users, and McFarland resorted to supplying the market with second-hand older models refitted with Thai types and keys. It was not until McFarland, during a 1922 visit to the US, worked with Remington to create a newer portable Thai model (known by the Remington brand), that the shift system began to gain acceptance among Thai users. Further work with Remington in 1925 resulted in a desktop version that McFarland successfully marketed along with promotion of the touch-typing system. He established a typing school, offering three months of free training for each typewriter bought, and the shift system gained traction among users, eventually replacing the older Smith Premiers. "The Good Companion" typewriter, with the Kedmanee Thai layout. The model was produced from 1932 to the 1960s. The early Thai shift typewriters had several design flaws. For example, characters with ascenders such as were missing, and had to be inputted as . The dead keys for above- and below-line vowels and tone marks also had to be typed before their corresponding consonants, in reversal of the usual writing order. while others credit Wiriya Na Sinlawan and pastor Pluang Sudhikam as the developers he worked with. (Remington and Olympia would become regarded as the two most popular typewriter brands in Thailand.) When the Thai Industrial Standards Institute published its first standard layout for computer keyboards in 1988, the Kedmanee layout was used as the basis of its TIS 820-2531 standard. Despite having diversified, Vidhayakom Company, the Remington importer born out of McFarland's business following its dissolution during World War II, went out of business following the 1997 financial crisis, during which the government halted procurement of typewriters. Today, a small market exists for vintage typewriters among collectors and enthusiasts, and a small number of typewriter repair and restoration specialists continue to operate independently, though they are the last of their generation, without any successors who might carry on their trade. ==Constraints and legacy==

In addition to bringing about the obsolescence of kho khuat and kho khon, the use of typewriters also had other effects on Thai typography and orthography. A few other symbols that were left out of the original typewriter layouts remain mostly unused and unrepresented on today's computer keyboards, despite having been reintroduced into standard Thai character sets, including Unicode. These include yamakkan (used to denote consonant clusters when writing Pali/Sanskrit), fongman (used to mark the opening of a poetic stanza), and angkhan khu and khomut (used to mark the end of stanzas/sections). The Thai script consists of consonants sitting on the baseline, with vowel symbols placed in front of, behind, above, or below them. Tone marks are placed above the consonants, or further above the above-line vowels, if applicable. As typewriters could only print these above- and below-line symbols at fixed vertical positions, their introduction formalized a concept in Thai typography where characters were separated into four vertical levels: the baseline, two above it, and one below. This had an effect on the orthography of the language, since a consonant could only have one above-line symbol in each level as a result, and constructions such as [kèŋ] were rendered impossible to type as the vowel symbol mai tai khu was in the same topmost level as the tone mark mai ek. Such spellings were subsequently abandoned, and the word is now written as . While the level separation is not necessarily a restriction of digital typography, standardized implementation guidelines continue to be based on this paradigm, while incorrect vertical positioning of tone marks remains an issue with some digital fonts and applications. ==Notes==