the internet, our people in Myanmar could not even buy a television or radio. The gap is huge.” Continuing the conversation, Win describes his country´s development as lagging5. Today two different forms of character-script are used in Burmese digital written language; Unicode and Zawgyi. From this point on and further into the thesis, while talking about character script regarding digital language, I will use the word font. With a font, I refer to what is called an encoding system, the coded structure behind a digital script. The font is simply a more straightforward term and is recognized as a substitute for encoding system in articles and other work I refer to. Unicode is a font that is recognized as an international standard. This means that different devices support it in different languages all around the world. A font is not language-specific since it is a system working with coding and decoding of text. Unicode, maintained by the Unicom Consortium, therefore commonly used by translation tools, and is through this aiming towards a seamless communication for digital text worldwide (Liao, 2017, p. 18). It would make perfect sense, then in Myanmar, to use Unicode, like most of the world. In Myanmar, however, while Unicode exists and is used by some people like Chit, it is more common to use another font called Zawgyi. Zawgyi was created in 20066 before the Burmese Unicode was fully developed. This was supposed to be a temporary solution, but Zawgyi is now, as of 2018, the most commonly used font. This situation created a massive, still ongoing, challenge for everyone working with technology inside and outside the country´s borders. The Zawgyi font is based on another, older, local version, of a digital script, Myazedi. Myazedi was created by Ko Ngwe Tun, at the time when Windows could not support intelligent rendering (reading) of the fonts. Ko Ngwe Tun organized and categorized each variation of every single character and gave it its code point7 (Hotchkiss, 2016). These locally created fonts do not function seamlessly with devices and internet platforms. 5 Lag/læg/(lags, lagging, lagged) verb: If one thing or person lags behind another thing or person, their progress is slower than that of the other. (Collins Cobuild, Advanced Dictionary of English, 2009) 6 At the time, it was not common to have internet or computer access, which means that only the wealthy and/or powerful had access and the need for a digital script. It was also common to write on typewriters and scan picture of the text to upload to blogs. 7 I will explain code points later in this chapter. 49