Zawgyi font is a predominant typeface used for Burmese language 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 with Burmese characters implemented in the Burmese block of Unicode but in a non-compliant way.
is a complex text layout script, whereby the position and shape of the grapheme varies based on context. The support for complex text rendering for personal computers did not arrive until Windows XP SP2 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. Compound the fact that Myanmar experienced Western sanctions, this had resulted in much of the Burmese localization technology being developed locally without cooperation with outside. Numerous Burmese supporting fonts were homegrown in the 2000s, but they were developed as Unicode fonts that were only partially Unicode compliant. Some of the codepoints for Burmese script were implemented as specified in Unicode but others were not, therefore the font is incompatible with Unicode. This is referred to as ad hoc font encodings by the Unicode Consortium. With the advent of mobile phones, mobile vendors such as Samsung and Huawei simply replace the Unicode compliant system fonts with Zawgyi versions. 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 Myanmar ethnic languages. In Zawgyi, the same word can be encoded in multiple different ways, making Zawgyi text corpus 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 technologies. Myanmar government has designated Oct 1 2019 as "U-Day" to officially switch to Unicode. The full transition is estimated to take two years.
