Facebook post without conversion (left) and with it (right). This post will detail the technical challenges involved in integrating these converters, including how we differentiate Zawgyi text from Unicode, how we can tell whether a device uses Zawgyi or Unicode, and how to convert between the two, as well as some lessons we learned along the way. Because we know this transition will take time, our Zawgyi-to-Unicode converter will continue to allow people transitioning to Unicode to read posts, messages, and comments even if their friends and family they have not yet transitioned their devices.

Today, to help the country continue its transition to Unicode, we are announcing that we’ve implemented font converters in Facebook and Messenger.

Next, we worked to ensure that our classifiers for hate speech and other policy-violating content weren’t going to trip over Zawgyi content and began work on integrating font converters to improve the content experience on Unicode devices. Last year, to support Myanmar’s transition to Unicode, we removed Zawgyi as an interface language option for new Facebook users. The lack of standardization around Unicode makes automation and proactive detection of violating content harder, it can weaken account security, it makes reporting potentially harmful content on Facebook less efficient, and it means less support for languages in Myanmar beyond Burmese. This is a problem for apps like Facebook and Messenger because posts, messages, and comments written in one encoding are not readable in another. It makes communication on digital platforms difficult, as content written in Unicode appears garbled to Zawgyi users and vice versa. This lack of a single standard has resulted in technical challenges for many companies that provide mobile apps and services in Myanmar. Instead, Zawgyi is the dominant typeface used to encode Burmese language characters. Myanmar is currently the only country in the world with a significant online presence that hasn’t standardized on Unicode, the international text encoding standard.

Online unicode font converter