Abstract

The ideals and practical value of Unicode have been clouded at times by local perceptions within individual countries of the Unicode Consortium mission, making Unicode adoption slow and incomplete in these countries. This paper presents a case study of the scenario in Myanmar, where the early success of the incumbent popular encoding/font standard called Zawgyi may impede the digital potential of the country. It first examines the successes and issues of Zawgyi. It then explains why it should be phased out as soon as possible as the legacy standard so as to save the future cost of not using Unicode and to achieve the full digital potential in several aspects of Myanmar society, including but not limited to accurate transcripts for law enforcement agency statements, fundamental data exchange at both regional and global levels for ecommerce, and for inclusive digital archive curation.