people who engage with foreign people regularly, without direct connection to the categories
mentioned above, have more awareness of the issue and are, in principle, pro-Unicode. From
what I am told, they would make the change if a solution were more accessible. Win describes
in figure V how he wishes there was one standard, but that local users, as long as something
functions not really make the change. As soon as a realistically and adequate solution enters
the market it would be possible, something that is not in any near future as far as I know.
The government’s position is something to consider this case. They could have done
something earlier to avoid this problem. It could be tempting to judge and directly criticize the
government, especially considering the historical context of the issue. In conversations with
Dedan, he would often state with a careless attitude that; “ah, the government don’t care, they
do their stuff and don’t care about these things.” Win once told me the government was not
able to handle the problem of the fonts, and they had never been. Thura presented a similar
attitude to me. These kinds of statements were never a surprise; I received them regularly
from different kinds of people. There have been other countries encountering this issue,
handling it early on, like Cambodia, where the government declared that everyone selling or
distributing in the country needed to use the Khmer-Unicode. The issue was then solved
(Hotchkiss, 2016). In Myanmar, however, the risk and inconvenience are too significant in
doing so now. At the moment, people are too dependent on Zawgyi.
The government has taken some action, however, publicly saying that communication with
governmental instances needs to be written in Unicode and that all statements and information
are published in Unicode. They do encourage the local user to use Unicode, and the
government is making some moves in that direction. There is, however, from what I have
been told, still, Zawgyi that is mainly used in communication from a day to day basis, also
inside the government. In using one consistent standard font, the government would likely
have significant benefits regarding governmental data, legal proceedings, etc. (Liao, 2017).
The problem is far from solved and the battle of the fonts is still a reality.
The above-mentioned pro-Unicode groups are not alone. As mentioned earlier, Zawgyi does
not support the different languages inside the country, since the font does not render these
automatically. In Zawgyi, you need to type the characters manually, and since you have
access to limited numbers of characters on a keyboard, this can be difficult. Unicode supports
all characters, and the rendering happens automatically, you save time and get the correct
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