Hi all as a rule cybercafes tend to be responsive to users. If enough users ask for Unicode 5.1 support, and there are enough Unicode 5.1 sites, then cybercafes will support it. And the reality is that proper Burmese support in applications will be built on Unicode 5.1, wether its OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Microsoft applications, etc Burmese locale support is Unicode 5.1 based. Line breaking and collation routines that ake their way into major applications will be Uniocde 5/1 based, etc. The question is how you facilitate the uptake rather than encouraging people not to migrate. 2008/7/26 Michael Everson <everson(a)evertype.com> I'd agree, but there is one key issue nobody seems to be addressing. Most users are using a pre-Vista version of Windows, and currently I am unaware of any legal software solutions for rendering Myanmar Unicode 5.1 on pre-Vista Windows, other than a handful of specialist SIL applications running Graphite, and some very old experiemnts in Firefox and OpenOffice For uptake, it needs to be easy and free or very very cheap. agree, and from memory a nnumber of convertors exist Some fonts are re distributable, but Uniscribe isn't. This is a furphy. There is absolutely no reason why Unicode 5.1 can't be phonetic. Although I question why it should be phoentic or more properly psuedo-phonetic. Likewise a keyboard layout could be either based on a logical or visual keyboard layout. This is just an implementation issue, the reality is that keyboard layout developers choose to implement keyboards certain ways, using certain technologies. From the point of view of keyboard layout design principles the Zawgyi keyboard layout is sub-optimal with many design problems. Even if you decide to implement a phonetic keyboard for Unicode 5.1 you would not base it on the Zawgyi layout. The Zawgyi layout uses teh same approach as legacy 8-bit fonts essentally. The Zawgyi layout indicates that the font doesn't support complex rendering, and the layout wasn't implemented for a "smart" input system. In part I'd agree, Myanmar Wikipedia should not be a burden. Although I don't think that avoiding font downlaods solves teh problem. At some point people will start migrating, Optimising the CSS will allow people to use any Uniocde 5.1 font they have is a necessary approach. Hopefully over tiem they determien which font suits tehir needs best. I'd rather ot tie it to a single font, whether its one particular uniocde 5.1 font or Zawgyi. -- Andrew Cunningham Vicnet Research and Development Coordinator State Library of Victoria Australia andrewc(a)vicnet.net.au lang.support(a)gmail.com