Reply To: Burmese Unicode support, or lack thereof, in InDesign

Hi there. I’m familiar enough with the combining, positioning and “out-of-order” characteristics of Indic languages, and taking some sample Myanmar text and trying it out with CS6, you might be right about Burmese/Myanmar not rendering correctly in InDesign.

There’s a post at
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1474251
which says
“There have been so many quasi-Unicode not-quite-there-yet fonts that have abuses of the OpenType font format to get them to more-or-less work in Word…”
…implying that some fonts are cheating in order to work correctly with Word and hang the compatibility (I’ve found this with Urdu and some Nastaliq script fonts).
However, the sample text I tried worked correctly (or at least the same as the website I took it from) when pasted into OS X’s TextEdit using Apple’s own Myanmar Sangam NM font, but failed (with characters in wrong/different positions) in InDesign with World Ready Paragraph Composer applied.
A bit inconclusive, but I’d say InDesign’s WRPC *may* not properly understand Unicode Myanmar/Burmese.

I wonder if it’s possible to convert your text to the non-standard Zawgyi encoding which seems to be prevalent with speakers of the language. A quick search found online converters between Unicode and Zawgyi. An unattractive workaround, and you might need to place the Zawgyi font in InDesign’s special fonts folder, rather than the system font folder (I’ve had to do this in the past to use non-standard font encodings in extremis).

Good luck,
Chris.