Every core translations must go through with UniMM latest packages which support the actual Unicode Standard 4.1 Rendering Algorithm. If you are not sure what it is about then please try only those web-base softwares' translation and print base purposes. UniBurma packages are not recommanded to use in any core translation purposes.

What is Unicode? What is UTF-8?

Converting to UTF-8 encoded document or project file

For example: index.html
Open with notepad.exe

File > Save as > encoding UTF-8

While you are saving in Notepad, by default it could change to *.txt(text file). To avoid this, you have to put double quotation mark to invoke the saving. For example, at the save as field.

"index.html"

Now, you may open with Dreamweaver or choice of your editor again and change your font to unicode font, UniBurma for example. This is total changes of your file to UTF-8 encoding.
php
Do not change binary executable php file to UTF-8 format which is not support by natively for now. If you do so, it will probably show header already sent error. But if your php file meant for templating purpose, you could do change to UTF-8 format. For example, PHP Template Engine, Smarty and etc.
html/pl/cgi/shtml
It's ok and suggest to change UTF-8 format for every unicode strings containing pages.

ANSI Hex-code way Authouring

{Dreamweaver Mx 2004}
Write your strings or contents at Microsoft Word or Notepad first.
Then copy those data into your Dreamweaver Design View and paste it. You will see square on Dreamweaver 2004 MX while Dreamweaver 8 compitable with utf-8. Now, switch to Code View and you will see that those strings change to hex-code form.

If you paste directly into Code View in Dreamweaver 2004 MX then it will poke! you as shown and if you force to save it will all change to ??? So, pls do change your files first as instructed in above the Notepad method.

Every editors which support Code View and Design View can do this way.
You may face some spacing adjustment problems. In this way your file is still ANSI format and you convert the unicode to hex-dec which ANSI understand.

Dreamweaver Version 8 support unicode character. Just update uniscribe or drop usp10.dll to that program folder.

MySQL Collation

UTF-8 encoding and Unicode handling in MySQL version 4.1 is better than previous version. If your MySQL is lower version than 4.1, please contact your host to upgrade accordingly. Myanmar collation for MySQL is of course not existed. But you could try the following collation. To use Myanmar unicode font with MySQL, it should be at least version 4.

MySQL 4.1 and above => utf8_general_ci
MySQL 4.0.* and below => ut8_unicode_ci


If you happen to use phpMyAdmin, use the utf-8 for default language encoding. Always backup before you update to your database. If you have already exsited tables, you could change by doing the following phpMyAdmin command.

Select Database > Select Table > Operations > Table Options > Collation > ut8_unicode_ci > Go


For creating new MySQL database/table/column, you can refer to MySQL document chapter 10.3.

Though it might be still printing stored Myanmar unicode strings, but by doing proper collation, it boots your site's search engine.

Authouring Web and CSS tips

Top heading html character set should be utf-8 whenever you enable the Myanmar unicode font enable contents. For example:
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" >
< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
< head >
< meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" / >
< title >Untitled Document< /title >
< /head >

Read the Native Language Web of my old blog entry archived at web.archive.org for WEFT font embedding tools and some alternative ways.

Myanmar Unicode Strings Search Engine Meta

To demo this, please right click > view source of this site. At the top, the meta data you wiil be found the Myanmar unicode string. This is search engine compatible and while searching with Myanmar unicode strings. Till now not much sites are existed. You can try this:

• http://www.google.com/search?q=မ္ရန္‌မာယူနီကုတ္
• http://www.google.com/search?q=မ္ရန္‌မာ
• http://www.google.com/search?q=မင္ဂလာပာ
• http://www.google.com/search?q=ပ္ရည္‌ထောင္‌စုမ္ရန္‌မာနုိင္‌ငံတော္

< meta name="description" content="UniMM, UniBurma, Myanmar Localization Project, Myanmar Unicode Font, မ္ရန္‌မာ, ပ္ရည္‌ထောင္‌စုမ္ရန္‌မာနုိင္‌ငံတော္, မင္ဂလာပာ, ယူနီမ္ရန္‌မာ, ယူနီဘားမား, မ္ရန္‌မာယူနီကုတ္" / >


PHP 4.3.11 and UTF-8

PHP natively do not support UTF-8 encoding which mean the working document file or project file. PHP can not execute UTF-8 encoded format file and it will give you hearder already sent error. But you can write the PHP code to convert or show your contents in UTF-8 encoding format. Don't get misunderstanding here. You have to clearly understand that the differences between project file itself is UTF-8 encoding format and your code inside are convertable to UTF-8 encoding.
For example: see these functions
http://us3.php.net/types.string
http://us2.php.net/htmlentities
http://us2.php.net/htmlspecialchars
Scott Reynen's blog have some converting code for UTF-8
http://www.randomchaos.com/document.php?source=php_and_unicode
Wordpress is using in this sort of coding method to support the UTF-8 encoding.

Translation Techonology

Read and understand the GNU Gettext technology.
Translation do not need to know any programming knowledge or coding. For example:
Car = ကား

poEdit Translation

poEdit is the actual and popular GPLed tool for translation which applied the GNU Gettext technology. Downloand it according to your system. Now you can translate those software which using GNU Gettext technology. For example: Wordpress translation, you have to download the pot file and open it from poEdit. In your poEdit preference, change the font accordingly to what you gonna translate. Example: Arial font in orginal strings field and UniBurma font in translation strings field.

Rosetta Translation

Rosetta is also using GNU Gettext technology but it is web base editor called Launchpad to translate all the strings. Launchpad specially design for Ubuntu distos translation but there are a lot of other GNU Gettext enable softwares (example: BazaarNG) ported to Lanuchpad.net for translation purpose. You can use both Launchpad and poEdit to & from to update the translated po files since they used same technology.

Dictionary

You must have different types of dictionary on hand. You should have Myanmar-Myanmar, English-English-Myanmar, English-Myanmar, Myanmar-English and English-English(you can use online) dictionaries. (All can buy at City Hall, Penizulla Plaza.)

Core

[Apple Globe]
Apple Globe is where you can translate Mac applications like iTune, iPod, etc into Myanmar strings. It is ease and just straight forward translation.
http://developer.apple.com/intl/localization/
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Internationalization/index.html

[Java]
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/index.html

[Desktops]
http://i18n.kde.org/translation-howto/
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/
http://anakin.ncst.ernet.in/~aparna/consolidated/index.html

Translation Others

Check other softwares which support unicode and UTF-8 encoding at unicode consortium.

(Myanmar/Burmese)utf-8 or not

People also told me "whether burmese or not" in programming. Yah, funny though. Because of this utf-8 foundry, we won't have choices. Even see these algorithm and Myanmar characters are properly byted inside to binary. It is like funcy way of programming in nowaday and take example by click this google.com search.

dig:
http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html
http://www.ansi.org/
http://www.cuj.com/
http://www.knosof.co.uk/
http://www.unicode.org/
http://www.utf-8.com/

This topic is still updating in progress. Please share your experiences. Spread the Winds - Pe'kok's