
Unicode in, Zawgyi out: Modernity finally catches up in Myanmar's digital world - polm23
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/09/27/business/tech/unicode-in-zawgyi-out-myanmar/
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TazeTSchnitzel
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawgyi_font](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawgyi_font)

Seems like what “Zawgyi” refers to is a Unicode font that uses the Burmese
block in Unicode but maps the characters in a way that's completely
incompatible with standards-compliant fonts. Sounds horrible.

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numpad0
> Furthermore, there were significant revisions in Unicode's implementation of
> Burmese script up until Unicode 5.1 in 2008.

So they didn’t have full Burmese support anyway until as recent as 2008?

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siraben
This is good news to hear. Last year I helped set up Android phones with
Burmese immigrants in Thailand and they gave me confused looks when I switched
the script to Unicode, especially since all their friends on social media
would be using Zawgyi, so I ended up switching the phones to English and
Zawgyi on a per-app (e.g. Facebook) basis.

However, it may be toughest to make this switch for casual users since the
"broken" Unicode essentially stops them from being able to communicate with
others.

