Zawgyi vs. Unicode: What’s the Difference?

Have you ever wondered what the difference is between Zawgyi vs. Unicode?

Well, Unicode was developed in 1991. However, Myanmar was still closed off to the world. So, while the rest of the world nodded in agreement to Unicode, Myanmar could barely hear the conversation.

In turn, Myanmar uses the Burmese standard for encoding, Zawgyi. It’s similar to Unicode except that Zawgyi is only used for Burmese characters in the Burmese language.

Here’s the core difference between Zawgyi vs. Unicode. With Unicode, that’s easy, as it’s an international standard. For Zawgyi, this is restricted to specific phones and one specific country - Myanmar.

So, what can be done to settle these differences between Zawgyi vs. Unicode? First, you can try to use web fonts - only for websites. Once the encoding is detected, you can use web fonts so that each block of text is displayed correctly.

You may also want to consider bundled fonts for mobile devices. That said, some devices and operating systems don’t allow users to change or replace fonts.

Finally, why not allow your users to switch between the two? While this adds complexity to the client and the server, you could give the users the option to switch themselves.

As Myanmar continues to develop their own technology, it’s important to sit up and take notice of these 55 million people.

If you’d like to learn more, check out the link below:

[nusuccessbythantzin]

Thanks for the information. I'm quite confused what type of font should I use when I develop a Burmese language website.

[thanglaka]

_@ __2:00__ Mranma's Govt had a department that dealt with Unicode Consortium way back in 1998, also helped by Keith Stribley ( now deceased), Michael and an American couple of Unicode consortium._
_Zawgyi font is a stolen one, a Microsoft font freely available for use, but needs permission to modify if. 3 or 4 developers of Zawgyi font, when they found they were unable to do Unicode standards, they hacked that font and placed Bama characters in places meant for characters of other Burmese languages. They released it wild, free as they can't make money or credit with stolen property and hiding since then.During that times, the country was run by incompetent, un-elected Greens, (some may have intention wiping off other Burmese languages). It is not a Burmese standard. It is a cowboy practice_
_Please note, Wikipedia in Burmese(Bama) language been going strong since 2002 and Burmese Wiktionary in top 20_

[ThawngTunngo]

လက်မဘဲရှိတဲ့ ပေတံကို ၁၂ စိပ် စိပ်ပြီး တစ်ပေပါ ဆိုပြီး သုံးနေတဲ့ မြန်မာနည်းမြန်မာ့ဟန် ဇော်ဂျီ သမားတွေ ဟာ မြန်မာနည်းမြန်မာ့ဟန် ဆိုရှယ်လစ် စနစ်နဲ့ ဗမာကို နှစ်ပေါင်း ၅၀ ကျော် နောက်ပြန်ဆွဲချခဲ့တဲ့ ဦးနေဝင်း အစိုးရနဲ့ အတူတူပါ...

[GoogleUser-qiuj]

ယူနီကုတ် မသုံးတဲ့ Android ဖုံး တွေက ဖုန်းအဟောင်း တွေသုံးနေတာ။😅

[Nathan-rxwi]

I accept all except what you said Unicode is easy ... ... actually is Zaw Gyi is more simple and easy in typing .... But yes, if you talk globally, we should change to Unicode for wider communication and inclusive in technology ... and yes today time is technology era ....

[ChannelEntH]

This Video will report. Coz Zawgyi users were serious users 😝

[aungsoe]

unicode သုံးရင် user တွေကို ထိန်းချုပ်ရတာ ပိုလွယ်သွားပါလိမ့်မယ်။ အထူးသဖြင့် social media တွေမှာ Convert အလွယ်လုပ်လို့ရတော့ ဘာတွေပြောနေလဲဆိုတာကို အလွယ်သိသွားပါလိမ့်မယ်။ အခုဆိုရင် ဗမာတွေ ဘာပြောနေလဲ သိရဖို့ ဝန်ထမ်းတွေ အများကြီးသုံးရပါတယ်။ တစ်ခြားနိုင်ငံတွေနဲ့ စကားစစ်ထိုးရင် အခုအခြေအနေက ဗမာတွေအတွက် တပန်းသာနေပါတယ်။ uni သုံးရင် စီးပွား​ရေး လုပ်ငန်းတွေက data တွေခိုးယူ ခွဲခြမ်းစိတ်ဖြာပြီး ဂျင်းထည့်ဖို့လည်း လွယ်သွားပါလိမ့်မယ်။