Support in Windows 8 for Burmese and languages from Myanmar

I noticed that Windows 8 had support for the following languages:

• Burmese
• Mon
• Eastern Pwo Karen
• Western Pwo Karen
• S'gaw Karen
• Pa'O
• Asho Chin
• Lisu

One annoying thing I want to point out is the typing order for vowel "ေ" [ei] and consonants. If you have learned how to write Burmese, you know that we write vowel [ei] (ေ) first and then a consonant, for example, ေ [ei] + က [ka̰]. The Burmese and Mon keyboards on Windows 8 want you to type the consonants first before you type the vowel: က [ka̰] + ​ေ [ei]. Please note that consonant + vowel is the correct order in which the characters are encoded. When we type in vowel [ei] first, the smart keyboard is reordering it to be saved after the consonant. Of course, there are other keyboards that support typing vowel ei first.

It's so unnatural for me to type vowel [ei] first. I switched back to Keith Stribley's keyboard, myWin. It's linguistically better in my opinion. I installed Ekaya-0.1.9_x86.exe because somehow 64-bit version didn't seem to work on my machine. Now I am all set for Burmese and Mon support on Windows 8 with Ekaya keyboard and Windows' built-in fonts.

Overall, I am glad that Windows 8 has support for these languages. Hopefully, everybody starts to use the actual Unicode standard now. SEALang's Burmese dictionary website renders perfectly fine in Windows 8 with Burmese and Mon enabled. So does the Mon dictionary.

On my Linux machine, I have been happy for a long time with ibus-kmfl from Summer Institute of Linguistics with Keith's keyboards because he provides the source "kmn" files for myWin Burmese, Mon, Karen and Pa'O keyboards.

Burmese unicode will hopefully replace widely-used and popular Zawgyi encoding in the long run.