"A BIG CHANGE is coming to keyboards near you on October 1, when the government and tech industry bodies have instructed that the Unicode encoding system become the default for Burmese fonts, replacing Zawgyi. The imminent change has significant implications for all key stakeholders, not least of all users. About 90 percent of device users are estimated to use Zawgyi, which has sometimes been described as the layman’s font. The problem is that most devices are set up to use Zawgyi exclusively, and Unicode has a number of important advantages, according to its proponents. The government has been moving in the direction of Unicode-compliant fonts for some time. Dr Tun Thura Thet, vice president of the Myanmar Computer Federation, told the Myanmar Connect telecoms industry conference in Yangon on September 18 that all government departments had successfully migrated to Unicode as of April. The MCF has identified five key stakeholder groups – telecommunications operators, content providers, the companies that make IT devices, the tech community and service centres – that it wants to see transition to Unicode in October, because it believes that users will then follow suit. On September 6, the Ministry of Information emailed a notification to media companies including Frontier that they were required to use Unicode-compliant fonts to post content in Burmese on their websites from October 1. The same applies to their social media posts. However, in a sign of how pervasive Zawgyi still is, the information ministry email to Frontier about the switch to Unicode was written using a Zawgyi font. Zawgyi and Unicode The move to Unicode was regarded as being necessary to bring international compliance to internet communication in Myanmar. Zawgyi developer U Ye Myat Thu said that when the first Zawgyi font was released in 2006 “the Unicode version at the time, 4.1, was not able to support the consonant medial ya, ra, wa, and ha sounds”. He said the popularity of Zawgyi was boosted by activists, citizen journalists and others who wanted to inform Myanmar and the world about the monk-led protests in September 2007 known as the Saffron Revolution..."