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What is the scale and potential difficulties involved for a migration like this? I hope some HN readers can inform us on the technical challenges.

• Ayesh 7y ago
  I'm native Sinhalese speaker, and we have many characters that were not included in Unicode up until 10 or so years ago. To "fix" this, we created different font files, so that when you type "w" in an En-US keyboard, the font glyph is "අ", which we pronounce "A" sound for. This worked out OK in place where we had control over the font. So rich text documents, this was less of a problem. In web sites, however, these text become mess because they use regular fonts with correct glyph/code-point match. We just abuse the fonts to get the characters we needed. When Sinhalese characters are in Unicode, we couldn't immediately translate them because you need to check if the fonts were using this botched font or not, and needed to do some serious replacing which is difficult because even with Unicode, we have diacritics and certain glyphs needed more than one unicode code-point to represent them. One glorious regex replace, in theory, can perform the similar migration for Burmese as well, you just have to write it.