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Tech Pages
Links
For more links, see the languages and languages/burma section of my (pabs)
bookmarks.
Languages
All the languages that
ImcBurma wants to use are supported in
ISO639/ISO639-2. The languages and their language codes are as follows.
Many languages are spoken in Burma. Please add more if they are going to be supported on the site.
| Language | Language Code |
|---|
| Burmese | my |
| Palaung | rbb |
| Pao | ppa |
| Kayan | ree |
| Arakan | mhv |
| Kachin | cgp |
| Shan | sjn |
| Mon | mnw |
| Karen | ksw |
Whether browsers will let ppl set them as their preferred language is another matter (firefox does not, unless you use about:config - the setting is intl.accept_languages).
Character sets
There are 4 methods for supporting Burmese text in computers. The are summarised on the
Burmese Wikipedia font page.
Fonts
Most fonts for Burmese characters make them glyphs smaller than english ones, so it is probably desiarable to increase the font size for Burmese text. It is possible to make the browser try to download and install required fonts using CSS, however this may not be supported in all browsers.
- ASCII fonts:
- Wwin*: Wwin_burmese has some issues with spacing on IE and the '-' character. This is apparently a fairly standard ASCII burmese font
- planet
- Unicode fonts:
- padauk:one and only truly-compliant Burmese Unicode font using graphite engine but soon to become obsolete as proposed chages to Unicode Consortium has been in pipeline for approval.
- MPH Yangon: this is an OpenType font. Has some spacing issues on Linux.
- Unicode + extra glyphs fonts:
Keyboards / Input Methods
- Using a normal us-104 etc keyboard to type ASCII and a special font to make it into Burmese
- requires HTML support
- almost essential that htmlarea be used, since you really can't expect ppl to know HTML
- Unicode
- Keyman
- ANSI WwinBurmese keymap.
- The paduk download also contains a keymap for this (presumably a unicode one).
- I also found another keymap, but I forgot the address, so ask on the imc-burma-tech list if you want it.
Burmese in GNU/Linux
- xkb: There is a keyboard layout for burmese
- locales: none in glibc yet, I (pabs) have been trying to prepare one, haven't got far
- fonts: no libre fonts, but several downloadable shareware and other unicode fonts - see above
htmlarea customization to use Wwin* fonts
Note: htmlarea has been discontinued, there are many replacements, the most popular one being
fckedit. I've yet to create a Wwin_Burmese version of this, but will do soon.
htmlarea is a WYSIWYG editor written in javascript so it can run in browsers. The latest version supports Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko based browsers.
TODO: Create fckeditor version, support more fonts, add a button for each of the languages.
Download customisation now
Course of action
There are 2 options to support burmese - htmlarea plus Wwin_Burmese etc and direct input of unicode. In the long term, the latter is desirable, but we should support both, and have mechanisms to convert the Wwin_burmese method to and from Unicode. This conversion is
important, because Unicode is a long-term solution, while Wwin_burmese is an awful kludge.
For the other languages, getting them into the burmese unicode block could be desirable, but that could take a long time, so the htmlarea method
must be supported, and the ability to convert the backlog of posts that use these languages to unicode needs to be thought about and prepared.
We can probably adapt much of the stuff needed to support the above from the software used by the
KhmerOS project.
--
PaulWise - 25 Dec 2004
--
GarconDuMonde - 14 Feb 2005 - added new pages
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