Thai fonts small compared to regular characters

[Javier SOLA <javier khmeros info>]

> The reason is that Thai font designs have to reserve upper and lower
> space for placing combining characters [1]. So, with the same point size,
> Thai base characters are always smaller than those of typical Latin fonts.
> This is true for other multi-level scripts, such as Laos, Khmer, Tibetan
> as well. However, those fonts always provide English glyphs with proper
> relative size. So, if the same font is chosen, the relative size would fit
> well.

This is because the rule of maintaining total height identical is used.

For our Khmer fonts (Khmer OS fonts) we have decided to use traditional typographical size for the main consonants. Vertical spacing is twice what it would be in a  pure latin font, but when you use size 10 you can perfectly read the text, and it can be mixed with size 10 of most Latin fonts.

The result for both approaches comes to the same when you use it in menus... you can only fit half the number of rows of what you could fit in a latin script language. 

Javier