Myanmar is a

Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes (code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ...

containing characters for the Burmese, Mon, Shan, Palaung, and the Karen languages of Myanmar, as well as the Aiton and Phake languages of Northeast India. It is also used to write Pali and Sanskrit in Myanmar.

Block

The block has sixteen variation sequences defined for standardized variants. They use (VS01) to denote the dotted letters used for the Khamti, Aiton, and Phake languages. (Note that this is font dependent. For example, the Padauk font supports some of the dotted forms.)

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Myanmar block:

Historic and nonstandard uses of range

In Unicode 1.0.0, part of the current Myanmar block was used for Tibetan. In

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, collation data referring to the old Tibetan block was retained as late as

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

, and removed in Windows 2003. In

Myanmar Myanmar, officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar; and also referred to as Burma (the official English name until 1989), is a country in northwest Southeast Asia. It is the largest country by area in Mainland Southeast Asia and has ...

, devices and software localisation often use Zawgyi fonts rather than Unicode-compliant fonts. These use the same range as the Unicode Myanmar block (0x1000–0x109F), and are even applied to text encoded like

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

(although Zawgyi text does not officially constitute UTF-8), despite only a subset of the code points being interpreted the same way. Zawgyi lacks support for Myanmar-script languages other than Burmese, but heuristic methods exist for detecting the encoding of text which is assumed to be Burmese.

References

{{reflist Unicode blocks

Block

History

Historic and nonstandard uses of range

See also

References