Sending emails to somebody is not a big task, everyone knows. However, it was not always easy to compose those emails daily in Burmese. The lack of a single standard made online communications difficult because a Burmese email written in Unicode appears jumbled to Zawgyi users’ devices and vice versa.

Pandita’s Myanmar Bulletin was not exempt from sending two versions of its daily updates to subscribers; one in Zawgyi fonts, and another in Standard Unicode font since 2017. Since November 2019, the two-version misery is over.

Indeed, Pandita adopted Unicode font as a standard in publishing Myanmar Bulletin Monthly editions since 2014. Not only in Myanmar Bulletin, Pandita’s other channels like Civics Now set its stand font Unicode, while Zawgyi is destined to come together. Whereas Civics Now is using Facebook as a platform, which sooner accepted both versions compatible, Civics Now can post in Unicode alone for all users.

For Myanmar Bulletin, it’s a different story because everyone reads emails using internet browsers or email apps which are not supporting either font to be compatible. Thus, Myanmar Bulletin did its daily emails in two versions for two years long.

Then, the Myanmar government announced standardizing Unicode font in all communication channels, starting with all government agencies and all telecom operators. Pandita really appreciated the move.

Even so, we extended one more month for the migration period to our busy subscribers. In November, all the daily bulletin updates are sent in Unicode only. Transitions might be slow, however, inevitable.