Zawgyi font is a predominant typeface used for
Burmese language
Burmese ( my, မြန်မာဘာသာ, MLCTS: ''mranmabhasa'', IPA: ) is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Myanmar (also known as Burma), where it is an official language, lingua franca, and the native language of the Burmans, the coun ...
text on websites. It is also known as Zawgyi-One or zawgyi1 font although updated versions of this font were not named Zawgyi-two. Prior to 2019, it was the most popular font on Burmese websites.
It is a
font
In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a " sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design.
In mo ...
with
Burmese characters implemented in the
Burmese block of Unicode but in a non-compliant way.
Unicode incompatibility (ad hoc font encodings)
Burmese script
Burmese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia
* Burmese people
* Burmese language
* Burmese alphabet
* Burmese cuisine
* Burmese culture
Animals
* Burmese cat
* Burmese chicken
* Burmese (horse), ...
is a
complex text layout
Complex text layout (CTL) or complex text rendering is the typesetting of writing systems in which the shape or positioning of a grapheme depends on its relation to other graphemes. The term is used in the field of software internationalizatio ...
script, whereby the positions and shapes of its
grapheme
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system.
The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called '' graphemi ...
s vary based on context. The support for complex text rendering for personal computers did not arrive until
Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...
Service Pack 2 in 2004, and a Burmese font utilizing this technology did not exist until 2005.
Furthermore, there were significant revisions in Unicode's implementation of Burmese script up until Unicode 5.1 in 2008. Compounding the fact that Myanmar experienced sanctions from the West,
this had resulted in much of the Burmese
localization technology being developed locally without external cooperation.
Numerous attempts at creating fonts with Burmese support were made in the 2000s, but they were developed as
Unicode font
A Unicode font is a computer font that maps glyphs to code points defined in the Unicode Standard. The vast majority of modern computer fonts use Unicode mappings, even those fonts which only include glyphs for a single writing system, or even on ...
s that were only partially Unicode compliant.
Some of the
codepoint
In character encoding terminology, a code point, codepoint or code position is a numerical value that maps to a specific character. Code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—but ...
s for Burmese script were implemented as specified in Unicode, but others were not. Therefore, these fonts became incompatible with Unicode. This is referred to as ''ad hoc font encodings'' by the Unicode Consortium.
With the advent of mobile phones, manufacturers such as Samsung and Huawei simply replaced the Unicode compliant Burmese system fonts with their Zawgyi equivalents.
There is significant shortcomings in using ad hoc font encodings. As a separate encoding, the situation leads to garbled text being shown between users of Zawgyi and Unicode.
Because the Zawgyi font encoding was not implemented as efficiently as specified in Unicode,
it had to occupy more codepoints than what is allocated for Burmese. As such, Zawgyi encoding took over the Unicode block reserved for the
languages of Myanmar
There are approximately a hundred languages spoken in Myanmar (also known as Burma). Myanmar, spoken by two-thirds of the population, is the official language.
Languages spoken by ethnic minorities represent six language families: Sino-Ti ...
.
In Zawgyi, the same word can be encoded in multiple different ways, making Zawgyi
text corpus
In linguistics, a corpus (plural ''corpora'') or text corpus is a language resource consisting of a large and structured set of texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and processed). In corpus linguistics, they are used to do statistical ...
difficult to search and analyze.
It is also difficult to sort Zawgyi text.
In addition, using Unicode would ease the implementation of
natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...
technologies.
The Myanmar government designated October 1, 2019 as "U-Day" to officially switch to Unicode.
The full transition was expected by some to take two years.
Conversion
International Components for Unicode
International Components for Unicode (ICU) is an open-source project of mature C/ C++ and Java libraries for Unicode support, software internationalization, and software globalization. ICU is widely portable to many operating systems and environ ...
supports conversion of Zawgyi-encoded data to conformant Unicode by means of the transliterator.
See also
*
Help:Multilingual support (Burmese)
References
{{reflist
External links
A Guide to Using Myanmar Unicode: Convert from old Myanmar fonts to UnicodeU.N.O.B. USA
has separate download links for Zawgyi font for Windows, MAC-Apple, and iPhone/iPad.
Zawgyi Unicode Converter , Myanmar Tools - Open Source Zawgyi-One & Standard Myanmar Unicode Converter
Typefaces
Unicode typefaces