Myanmar Word Processing with Unicode

Not that I am knowledgeable about Myanmar language word processing. But I’d done quite a lot of drafting reports in English with Microsoft Word earlier and then with OpenOffice later. But I had also seen keyers busily typing and laying out Myanmar text in pre-Zawgyi and pre-Unicode days invariably with Aldus PageMaker in Desktop Publishing services.

As far as I know there never have been a dedicated word processor for Myanmar text in the sense of having the capability for spelling checking, grammar, thesaurus, and automatic line breaks, to say the least. To develop a dedicated Myanmar language word processor with a minimal of capabilities found in English language word processors, the most feasible approach would be take some open-source word processor and customize it, I guess.

However, it still seems a long way off.

MS Office alternatives

Apache OpenOffice has been my long time favorite. Now, as reported in my last post, Myanmar Computer Federation said that they have OpenOffice 3.1 with an almost complete Myanmar language user interface for download. So I downloaded it and try to install it on my Windows-7 laptop. Then the installation failed with this message:

I guess it actually meant “A newer version OpenOffice.org 4.1.6” because I have that already installed. When I checked OpenOffice.org’s website, I found out that Myanmar user interface for version 3.1 is not yet complete, and they need someone to take care of it!

So I looked at the website of the “LibreOffice”, which was a fork of the OpenOffice. “In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development …”. I found out that it currently supports 140 languages, including Myanmar. That means the user interface (UI) would be in Myanmar language. Also the offline help content, will be in Myanmar language and if available, spelling checking, grammar, thesaurus, line breaks, etc. would be in the UI language.

I downloaded the LibreOffice version 6.2.7 from their website here. I chose their second latest version because I wanted a more stable version. When I installed it I want to have the program with Myanmar language UI. For that you have to select the “Custom Installation” option and specify Burmese:

I opened LibreOffice and the Writer. Because I am a very poor typist, I copied a short article from Myanmar wikipedia and pasted on Writer page. After a little bit of formatting, here it is:

You can see that the UI is in English.
To get the Myanmar UI, you start from the Tools menu and then go to /Options/language settings/languages and select the following options:

After that you get the Myanmar UI.

Now I try typing Pho Gyi Sein Bedar’s piece of lyrics from his famous tune:

I said I’m a terrible typist and I could do that only because I can use the onscreen version of the Keyman keyboard! Would you try that now?

Concluding comments

You can see that LibreOffice gives you Myanmar language UI, while that of OpenOffice.org is not yet complete. But if you explore further you’ll find that help content in LibreOffice is not yet available in Myanmar language.

IMHO, for someone familiar with MS Word, the availability of UI in your own language is not very important. In that case, either LibreOffice or OpenOffice would equally work for you. IMHO there is no point in using a pirated copy of Microsoft Office if open source alternatives like LibreOffice or OpenOffice are available.