PVT tawla or lost in font jungle

As mentioned in my last post Myanglish PVT, I was frustrated, so much frustrated in failing to get a respectable version of PVT data collection application in Myanmar language. It must have been because I have committed the sin of borrowing the name Tawla (into the woods), a classical genre of Myanmar poetry not by its time-honored name as it is, but calling it Sylvan Stroll for my other blog, sooner or later the gods will have to punish me. Here's how my PVT got tangled in the font jungle.

From those screenshots, since I've created the application with Myanmar3 font, I could very well understand that default font, and Zawgyi One could not reproduce the original one for Myanmar3 as shown in the first screenshot at the top. Because they are not fully compliant unicode fonts.

Among the two Android phones (HTC Desire-X, Xiaomi Redmi) and one tablet (Samsung Galaxy Tab3), only the Samsung allowed the installation of Myanmar fonts and I had installed Myanmar3, Padauk unicode, and Zawgyi One for the purpose of this test. The tablet already had Frozen Zawgyi keyboard pro and Frozen keyboard installed when my son gave it to his mom. From that I could guess Zawgyi is the popular font for Facebook and pardon me for not been a part of this immensely popular culture here.

For HTC Desire-X, it came with its own default Myanmar font. Comparing it with the last screen shot of previous picture I saw an exact match. So the font in HTC must be Zawgyi One. This laboriously found piece of information by poor me, and more, must have been just some common knowledge in the Myanmar font community.

But what surprised me most was the way the Myanmar3 font displayed perfectly on Windows environment becomes garbled on the Android. It was said that the Android platform is not as good as the Windows platform in rendering Myanmar unicode fonts. But the difference in Myanmar3 font on Windows and Myanmar3 font on Android seems to lie in reasons deeper than that.

Looking at the screenshots I hope the Myanmar font gurus may see at once what was wrong, and then they would look for solutions. The following examples from Myanmar Fonts which follow Unicode rules and some other fonts in the Unicode family not reproduced here, shows the same Myanmar-sar, excepting a few glitches here and there.

If I am right those examples were for Windows platform. Obviously however, regardless of platform, if different Myanmar fonts comply with the same unicode standard, they should display the same Myanmar-sar. Or would we be expecting too much for the Android platform at present?

On my Windows-7 laptop, Myanmar3 and Tharlon are interchangable and in fact when I believed that the list of political parties posted on UEC website has been done in Myanmar3 it was because I could perfectly see Myanmar-sar without loss with that font. Now when I try repeating the process by copying from the UEC website (here) and pasting it on Excel, I notice now only that the font name appears as Tharlon. Well, I must have been influenced by the information I got somewhere that Myanmar government is using Myanmar3 as a de facto standard to miss that clue. That didn't seem to harm my PVT application, though.

As I said, from among the three Android phone/tablet available to us only the Samsung tablet allowed me to install Myanmar font without “root”. I installed Myanmar3 and Padauk fonts using the iFont application available from the Google Playstore. Then the views by different fonts shown in my screenshots were enabled by making changes with Settings  Display  Font Style. The result on my PVT data collection application is as you can see in the first set of screen shots shown above.

In the case of my Xiaomi Redmi phone, I can't get the Myanmar3 or Padauk font installed as yet. I came to know that Xiaomi phones available locally here have been customized to be able to install such fonts. Mine is with the ROM Redmi 1 WCDMA Stable Version (Singapore) JHBMIBH25.0 and can't install application software designed for other ROMs, such as for Myanmar. I've started a thread on the official MIUI website asking for help and replies on it don't seem to promise any solution as yet.

As for the HTC Desire-X phone, I couldn't find Settings  Display  Font Style on it and so didn't try installing the required Myanmar font for my PVT application.

All in all, even if I could find solution to install the desired unicode fonts on any Android phone, it would be futile if I would get the kind of garbled results that I have demonstrated. Anyway, it's out of my league to understand why it happened the way it happened. Do I blame the Android or the font designers, or both?

So much for complexities. What I thought would have been a simple task of replacing English labels with Myanmar on the Android application turned out to be something not so simple at all. For now, I've gotten lost in the font jungle in the very first verse of my PVT tawla.