Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Reading/Writing Burmese/Myanmar in OS X

Burmese/Myanmar is spoken by an estimated 42 million people in S.E Asia. Support for this script is not yet included in OS X, but XenotypeTech offers a commercial kit for the Mac.

Sources of free fonts and keyboards are:

http://edwardwitten.blogspot.com/2007/10/zawgyi-myanmar-keyboard-for-mac-os-x.html

http://www.myanmaritpro.com/

There seem to be two standards in common use. Some info about their differences can be found here.

Burmese/Myanmar on iPad and Other iOS Devices

Those wishing to read and write Burmese/Myanmar on iOS devices should try the apps iMyanmar and MMKeyboard.

I would be interested in any reports about how well they work. These apps incorporate a Burmese font to make up for the lack of one in iOS.

Friday, May 6, 2011

Custom Keyboards for iOS Devices

While there is still no way to create custom keyboards for iOS the way you can for OS X, I have seen two apps which let you produce keyboards that can be used to generate text for emailing or copy/pasting into other apps. These are UniKey and Unicode Map. UniKey comes with keyboards already made for Georgian, Armenian, Chess, and Afrikaans.