Burmese text showing as boxes or question marks? Zawgyi vs Unicode

What's happening

Burmese text has two incompatible encoding traditions: Zawgyi (a legacy font hack that dominated Myanmar's internet for years) and Unicode (the international standard). Text typed in one renders as scrambled or overlapping characters in the other — and text in either renders as empty boxes (􀀀 or □□□) on systems missing a Myanmar font. If a family says your translated letter 'looks broken,' this is almost always why, not a translation problem.

The fix, in order

• Standardize on Unicode. Myanmar officially switched in 2019; every current phone OS ships Unicode Myanmar fonts. Never publish Zawgyi.
• If you received Zawgyi text (older documents, some Facebook copy-paste), convert it — this site's free Font Fixer (/tools/zawgyi-converter) detects and converts both directions.
• For documents: use a font with Myanmar coverage — Noto Sans Myanmar (free, Google) or the system font Myanmar Text on Windows. Embed fonts when exporting PDFs.
• For web: add a Myanmar font to your font stack; 'font-family: sans-serif' alone renders boxes on some Windows configurations.

Quick test

The word မြန်မာ ('Myanmar') should show three connected round glyphs with stacked marks. If you see boxes, install a Myanmar font. If you see characters that look detached or doubled, you're likely viewing Zawgyi text on a Unicode system — run it through the Font Fixer. All Burmese output from this site's translator is already Unicode, so it displays correctly on modern devices with no extra work.