His keynote speech at the 5th Annual State of the Net Conference 2009 is great. The guy is visionary and thoughtful. He emphasizes the open access of data and collaboration among several entities of government.
Burmese needs to be translated into Burmese. Did you get confused? Please read on for the whole story to understand why. Facebook introduced translation into Burmese in its latest Mobile Facebook app (version 57). You can choose to translate stories into a particular language, and Burmese is one of them. What translation into Burmese does is converting the posts written in Zawgyi into standard Unicode encoding. Zawgyi is a very popular font encoding used by most Burmese online. It's not an official Unicode standard and breaks the standardization. However, it caught on early and became very popular before the Burmese Unicode standard was fully developed and supported by vendors. Most Burmese use Zawgyi on Facebook and everywhere online. It's very inconvenient for people like us who doesn't want to install Zawgyi in our computers and mobile devices. There are plugins for popular browsers such as Chrome and Firefox to either do the conversion to Unicode or tag Zawg
I think it's time for me to write something about current status of Myanmar Unicode fonts. Recently I have been seeing many people using ZawGyi-One Unicode font on some blogs. So I installed that font on my system. I also had MyaZedi font installed. Yesterday, I installed a new one, MyMyanmar Unicode font. What I found out was that since they used different partial encodings, it messed up my Burmese language display. It's very bad that they all use their own partial encodings, not fully compliant to true Unicode standard. Padauk is the one and only almost-truly-Unicode-compliant. The only problem with Padauk is they use Graphite rendering engine. You need to install a special build of Graphite-enabled Firefox . Graphite rendering is slow for a very long Burmese page. And if you type in Padauk using Microsoft Word, it won't render correctly. You will also need a special Graphite-enabled word-processors such as OpenOffice . Myanmar1 from Myanmar Unicode and
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