how to write Burmese in latex?

Question

I'm working with a linguist who is writing a paper about Burmese. I'm trying to get his paper to work in latex. There're lots of symbols in Burmese. but I struggle to find the commands in latex to get them displayed. Can I please get some help with this. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks very much.

Answer 1

If you use xelatex or lualatex then you can use fonts installed on your system. I made a sample text using google translate and firefox displayed it using a font "Mayanmar Text" which probably came with Windows, so I can access that font in xelatex as:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Myanmar Text}
\begin{document}

တစ်နှစ်သုံးဟဲလိုကမ္ဘာကြီး
\end{document}

which hopefully says

one two three hello world

Answer 2

For any future people looking to write in a Myanmar language (Burmese, Kayin/Karen, Mon, etc.) I'll share what I've learned so far.

Use XeLaTeX, as that is the best way to get the script to render properly. I've had trouble with LuaLaTeX; i.e. it would not render the script properly. If you're familiar with Myanmar script, it was like looking at Zawgyi-encoded text with a Unicode font, or vice-versa. Also use Padauk or Padauk book as your font with the fontspec package; if you want to have clean line breaks an Open Type font is necessary here. Encoding should be UTF-8.

With the above applied, you should be fine writing with any Unicode keyboard (Padauk is a Unicode font, unlike the commonly used Zawgyi font and keyboard for Burmese). Windows has one built in, and you can find a few others on the web. Sample code below:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\XeTeXlinebreaklocale "my"  %Myanmar line and character breaks
\XeTeXlinebreakskip = 0pt plus 2.5pt
%under 2pt and I still was getting text going past the margins.
\setmainfont[Script=Myanmar]{Padauk Book}
\begin{document}
မြန်မာလိုရေး‌‌နေပါသည်
\end{document}