How to display Burmese characters on website and record them in MySQL if the user doesn't have the font?

Question

I need to develop a website for a client in Myanmar. The website will obviously be in the Burmese language and they want it to be readable by people who do not have Burmese fonts on their machine.

I know wikipedia managed to do it here but I still haven't found how.

Will I have to write the Burmese characters using their HTML unicode codepoints? I have already found a library that manages to display Burmese characters if I provide the Unicode codepoint so I guess this is an option.

The other problem is that they want to insert Burmese text in a MySQL database. How am I going to store it? Using which encoding in MySQL? And then how to display it on machines that do not have Burmese fonts installed?

I hope I am clear and not too confusing.

Answer 1

The Wikimedia page mentioned in the question use the free Tharlon font as a downloadable font (via `@font-face'). It is a Unicode-encoded font, so you can enter the real Burmese characters in UTF-8 encoding. Depending on your authoring tools, you might need some extra utility in order to type characters, like Windows Character Map or my Full Unicode Input utility (select block Myanmar).

Answer 2

Embedding custom fonts can be done, follow the below link

Custom font via CSS

Storing Burmese, you can use nvarchar or ntext or similar data types in your SQL to store

It will be stored as is and will be rendered as is.