Myanmar character picker

Reference material:

Quick start

(You must have JavaScript enabled.) Choose a view (see below). Click on characters/shapes to insert text into the output field or use your keyboard for Latin characters, delete, etc. You can also add codepoints and escapes via the "Add codepoint" field (hit return to add to the output field).

Then cut & paste the result to your document, or use the tabs to get further information about the characters. You can also paste text into the output field to get information about it. Use the yellow box to set preferences or search (regular expressions allowed).

About the chart

Includes all the characters in the Unicode 5.1 Myanmar block. Note: There are important changes to the Myanmar block in version 5.1 that will require changes to all existing Unicode text currently in Myanmar. Seven new characters have been added to the picker to accomodate this. You can find appropriate fonts in the links below.

Alternative views are available. You can start up directly in one of the views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, alphabet, shape, phonic or fontgrid.

Alphabetic Consonants are in a modified Indian articulatory arrangement, to the left. To their right are all the other characters. Independent vowels are on the top line. Then follow the combining characters. These have been arranged so that is easy to input multiple characters in the right normalised order: characters to the left precede those to the right, characters higher up precede those lower down. The line after the combining characters contains various symbols and punctuation. The bottom line in this section contains numbers 0-9.

Some character combinations have been added, for ease of typing. These include some vowels and the kinzi.

Click on the 'Advanced' arrow top right for less often used characters.

Shape This view is purely based around shape, and is therefore good when you don't know the script well at all, or for shapes you don't know. In addition to single characters, it includes groups of characters that interact to form new shapes. This is not an exhaustive list of shapes in Myanmar writing, but covers most common shapes and should help distinguish between the many very similar characters.

Characters are grouped and ordered by visual similarity. The orange shapes at the top usually indicate the left-most part of a character shape; characters and combinations that start with that shape are arranged together in the main area. Within a group I attempted to put easily confusable characters close to each other. The 'misc' group at the bottom contains a mixed bag of characters that didn't fit elsewhere.

Where the shape of the characters involved in a cluster doesn't really change, eg. when subscripts are used, I don't usually list the combination here. You should search for the two shapes and add a virama between them.

A small orange plus sign to the right of a shape indicates that there are similar shapes outside the current group. These will be highlighted when you mouse over the shape with the plus sign.

Phonic I use this for typing in text for which I have a transcription, or for creating phonemic transcriptions. The Latin/IPA characters on the grey background represent common ways in which a Myanmar character might be transcribed. You can use these to find a Myanmar character and click on it to add to the output area, or you can click on the grey box to produce a phonemic transcription.

Below the consonants are asat, virama, tone marks and punctuation. Vowels are below those. Consonants are arranged similarly to the standard IPA chart. Alternatives with the same sound are separated by a red dot. Characters that have different sounds in different positions are also listed under those sounds.

For less common characters, switch to the Alphabetic view.

Font grid Shows characters in Unicode order, using whatever font is specified in the Font list or Custom font input fields. This allows comparison of fonts (especially useful in IE, which shows if a glyph is missing from a font).

Useful URIs

Instructions for use

Downloadable fonts for Windows: Myanmar Unicode & NLP Research Center and SIL International. Eventually more should appear at sites by David McCreedy, Alan Wood.

Other pickers

Introduction to Myanmar (my rough notes)

Changes to Myanmar in UniView 5.1 (Unicode Technical Note)

Myanmar in UniView

Myanmar transcription (This is just a small utility I wrote for myself, to convert Myanmar characters to Latin.)

If something is missing

... let me know.