Lisu Flag of China Flag of Myanmar Flag of Thailand

Lisu is spoken by the Lisu people in the borderlands of China, Myanmar and Thailand.

There is only one DBT template for Lisu: Lisu - Basic.

For the details about the DBT translator used by Lisu: click here.

Uncontracted Braille

This language is usually produced in uncontracted braille, which means that words in the text are rendered in braille on a one-for-one basis: one braille character for each inkprint letter. Some inkprint punctuation may require more than one braille character. Indicating upper case, emphasis, or numbers also adds braille characters to the character count. However, the braille contains no abbreviations or contractions.

If you have questions about producing correct braille, please contact a member of the appropriate braille authority.

The Fraser Alphabet

Lisu is written in an alphabet (which dates from circa 1920) that was named after British missionary, James Fraser. There are two ways of writing Lisu text in the Fraser alphabet. One is to use the standard Unicode range for Lisu, from U+A4D0 to U+A4FF. The other is to use a special font, ls78, that remaps simple ASCII characters to the Fraser alphabet.

Both methods work reasonably well. However, to use the ls78 font in a Word file and import the text into DBT, you may need to convert the document format from .docx (an XML format) to the older binary .doc format. The .doc format dates from 1993 but Word generally still supports it. And DBT still imports this format, though importing using .docx is generally recommended.