Myanmar is a Unicode block 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.) Variation sequences for dotted forms U+ 1000 1002 1004 1010 1011 1015 1019 101A 101C 101D 1022 1031 1075 1078 107A 1080 base code point base + VS01
History The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Myanmar block:
Version Count UTC ID L2 ID WG2 ID Document 3.0 U+1000..1021, 1023..1027, 1029..102A, 102C..1032, 1036..1039, 1040..1059 78 N881 N1167 N1523 N1603 N1729 N1780 N1826 N1703 html) doc, Ireland, Japan) N1883R2 N1912 N1913 html, doc) N2003 doc) 5.1 U+1022, 1075..1099, 109E..109F 40 N2768R doc) N3080 N3143 doc) doc) N3277R2 U+1028, 1033..1034, 105A..1064 14 N2827 N2966 N3061 N3044 N3079 N3099 doc) U+102B, 103A..103F 7 N3043R N3069 N3078R doc) U+1035 1 N3115 doc) U+1065..1074 16 N3142 doc) 5.2 U+109A..109D 4 N3436 N3423R N3492 doc) doc)
Historic and nonstandard uses of range In Unicode 1.0.0, part of the current Myanmar block was used for Tibetan. In Microsoft Windows, collation data referring to the old Tibetan block was retained as late as Windows XP, and removed in Windows 2003.
In Myanmar, 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 (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.
See also Myanmar Extended-A (Unicode block) Myanmar Extended-B (Unicode block) Myanmar Extended-C (Unicode block)
References