About automatically checking the correct sequence of South Asian characters

The feature described in this Help topic is only available if support for Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, or another South Asian language is enabled through Microsoft Office Language Settings.

South Asian languages follow stringent grammatical rules for the composition of words that dictate which textual character elements are permitted to stand next to one another. To add to the complexity of correctly entering characters, South Asian text contains both simple characters and more complex characters that include one or more markings, such as diacritics, tone marks, vowels, and accents. For example, in Thai, leading vowels must be followed by a consonant that does not include vowel markings or diacritics located below it. In Vietnamese, only one tone mark is permitted on each vowel and that mark can be typed only after the vowel. Typing a tone mark after a consonant will not insert the character in the file.

To assist you in correctly entering characters in your document that follow the grammatical rules for the enabled South Asian language, text is automatically checked for you when you are using a rich edit or HTML e-mail format.

Note   Microsoft Word provides several enhancements to editing text in a South Asian environment, such as sequence checking. You can use these features in other programs if you use Word as your editor.