One of the main stumbling blocks to Internet development in Laos is the continued lack of an easy, standardised way of using the Lao script in electronic communications. At the present time messages in Lao can still only be typed as E-mail attachments, and even then due to the proliferation of different fonts on the market it is uncertain whether or not the recipient will be able to read the message.

However, there are signs that this is about to change. Under the auspices of the International Development Research Centre-funded research project entitled ‘Pan Localisation: A Regional Initiative to Develop Local Language Computing Capacity in Asia’, LANIC is currently conducting development work on a Lao Unicode font, keyboard driver and lexicon, as well as a Lao-English dictionary that includes sorting, spell-check and grammar-check functions and a font conversion system for existing non-Unicode Lao fonts. Being open-source based, the new software application will be legally free of licensing fees.