Myanmar character picker 10

Notes:

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 - for example, to find the letter GA, enter \bga\b, or the short form :ga:).
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.; All text is output in Unicode normalisation form NFC by default. You can change to NFD or no normalisation by clicking on the buttons in the yellow area. Note that normalization only takes place when you click on a character - text pasted into the box won't be normalised until you click on another character above, or click on a button in the yellow area. (Note: normalization is turned off for Han characters in this application.)
Alternative views: The following alternative views are available by clicking just below the page title. You can start up directly in one of the views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, default, shape, transcript or fontgrid.; Default This view is likely to be more useful to people who are somewhat familiar with the alphabet and characters of Myanmar.; Characters have been arranged so that is easy to input them, and especially to ensure that multiple combining characters are input in the right normalised order. Independent vowels are at the far left. To their right are the consonants, in a modified Indian articulatory arrangement, followed by some characters (in the vertical boxes) that are always input immediately after a consonant if there are multiple combining characters. To their right are all the other characters: In the upper part are the vowel signs and other combining characters. In the right half, characters on the upper lines are input before the combining characters below them. The line below the combining characters contains punctuation. The bottom lines contain 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 may help locate many ligatures and conjuncts you don't recognise.; Characters are grouped and ordered by visual similarity. The orange shapes at the top typically indicate the left-most or top-most part of a character shape; characters and combinations that start with that shape are arranged together. Within a group I attempted to put easily confusable characters close to each other. The 'misc' section at the bottom lists 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.; Transcription I use this for typing in text for which I have a transcription, or for creating phonemic transcriptions.; The large characters on a grey background represent characters used by Mesher in Burmese for Beginners. To type Myanmar text starting from a transcription, click on these characters. If there is only one Myanmar character corresponding to the transcription letter, it is inserted directly into the output field. If there are multiple alternatives, these are presented to you in a selection list: click on the Myanmar character you need in the selection list and it is added to the output.; Each Myanmar character is associated with a phonetic symbol (a Latin/IPA symbol on white background to its left in the selection lists). If there is more than one possible phonic representation you will see the selection list divided appropriately. As you select characters, the phonetic symbol to its left is stored. If you click on the Phonemes button, below the output area, these are all added to the output. This provides a quick way of generating a phonetic transcription from a Latin transcription. In some cases a Myanmar character is repeated within the same selection list because it has more than one possible phonetic equivalent - in such cases, choose the right one if you want to generate this phonetic transcription.; The vowels to the left produce no output, but allow you to capture phones for creating a phonemic transcription. Vowels in the middle list non-pointed characters (matres lectionis). These do not necessarily represent a vowel sound themselves (eg. alef), but exposing them in this way makes it easier to obtain phonemic transcriptions. The vowels to the right are for creating pointed text. Often these will need to be used with alef, he or ayin - in which case, look for those characters under 'silent' in the list of consonants above.; Just above the output area there is a line of Latin characters. This represents the union of all transcription and phonetic characters, and is provided in case you wish to just type in a transcription directly.; For less common characters, switch to the Alphabetic view.; As you mouse over the Latin characters on the grey background, the corresponding Myanmar characters are also displayed near the top of the page. This is to aid in searching, but you can also select characters from there.; 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).
Special commands: Phonemes While you click on Myanmar characters in the Transcript view, the picker automatically records in a buffer the associated phonemic character to the left of each character you click on. Clicking on this icon will dump those characters into the output area at the current cursor position, and clear the buffer. It is quite basic (for example, it doesn't take into account vowel reduction), but is offered as a way of speeding up text entry where you want to type both the Myanmar characters and the phonemic transcription.; Hyphens are provided for the inherent vowel sounds to help produce these transcriptions. They produce no output in Myanmar script, but the phonemic value is stored in the buffer.
Other features: For further information about features of the tool or user interface, see How to use..
Useful URIs: Downloadable TrueType and OpenType fonts: Myanmar Unicode & NLP Research Center and SIL International, and SIL International. Eventually more should appear at sites by Wazu Japan and Alan Wood.; Introduction to Myanmar (my rough notes); Myanmar script description in Wikipedia; 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.); Other pickers
If something is missing: ... let me know.