At the moment the only input method that provides good support for Myanmar Unicode is Tavultesoft Keyman on Windows and the related KMFL module for SCIM on Linux. Tavultesoft Keyman was until recently free for personal use. You need to pay to compile keyboards, but the keyboards here have been already compiled. KMFL can use the same Keyboard Source files as Keyman, but it is covered by a GPL license. KMFL is a module for SCIM, the Smart Common Input Method framework on Linux. You can download KMFL source and binaries from Source Forge.

A few Myanmar Unicode keyboard layouts are now available for Keyman. myWin2.1 (loosely based on the traditional layout used by WinMyanmar fonts) supports the new Unicode proposal. Myanmar NLP is also developing one for the Myanmar2 font, but it should be compatible with Padauk and other fonts compliant to the proposed changes.

The Unicode layouts do not exactly match the old layouts because all the old fonts relied on complicated for Alt and Ctrl key code combinations to get the different glyph combinations. With a smart input method this is no longer needed so all the Myanmar characters can be typed using only the normal keyboard keys + Shift combinations.

my-Win 2.1

Keyman Setup

Run the Keyman installer my-Win-2.1 installer and choose which version of Keyman you want. If you are a home user, the Home Use edition is free and perfectly adequate for your needs. Other users will need to purchase a license from Tavultesoft. If you already have Keyman installed, then you can just download the .kmx files and double click on them to install them. You can switch keyboards by clicking on the Keyman icon in the task tray. You may need to enable support for an “Unknown Language” in the Keyman Options dialog.

KMFL Setup

Download the appropriate RPMs or Debian packages for your Linux distribution from kmfl.sourceforge.net or build from source.

Download an appropriate .kmn file from keyboard downloads and create a kmfl directory either as ~/.scim/kmfl (current user only) or /usr/share/scim/kmfl (system wide) and then copy the *.kmn files and the icons directory into this directory.

Add the following lines to your ~/.bash_profile (you could create a file called /etc/profile.d/kmfl.sh containing these lines if you want it to take affect for all users).

export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM 
export LD_LIBARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBARY_PATH

The last line is only needed if you build from source. You will need to logout for these changes to take effect. See KMFLInstallationInstructions.sxw for more details.