CrossInk-Indic now reads Burmese, on every Xteink

After the 13 Indic languages, CrossInk-Indic has one more: Burmese. It's out in v1.6.0-indic.3, for every Xteink model CrossInk supports (X3, X4, X4 Pro, X4 Classic and Seeed's Sticky), with the script built in and a menu in Burmese.

My Burmese test book on the X4 Pro simulator: a page of letters and stacked consonants, and a justified page.

What's in it

• Noto Sans Myanmar, regular and bold, at every reading size and in the menu fonts.
• Its own shaper. Burmese needs things the Indic shaper doesn't do: kinzi, medial ra, ေ drawn before its consonant, stacked consonants. So I ported HarfBuzz's Myanmar shaper. It gives the same result as HarfBuzz on 24,320 generated test strings, in regular and bold, and on all 40,602 distinct words of three real Burmese novels a reader sent me.
• A Burmese menu, all 845 strings, translated with machine help and checked with back-translation. It still needs a native speaker's eye.

Settings with Burmese picked as the language, the System tab, and the reader menu.

Why Burmese was different

Burmese has no spaces between words, only between phrases. So a line can't just break at a space. It breaks between syllables instead, never before a final consonant and never inside a number. Justified text stretches only the spaces between phrases.

There's no dictionary behind it, so now and then a word gets split at the end of a line.

One more thing: books in Zawgyi, the old Burmese encoding, show the wrong letters. It reads Unicode Burmese only.

Which file

On the v1.6.0-indic.3 release there are two files per reader:

• firmware-<reader>-v1.6.0-indic.3-my.bin: Burmese menus, plus English.
• firmware-<reader>-v1.6.0-indic.3-read-myanmar.bin: English menus, Burmese books.

<reader> is x3-x4, x4-pro, x4-classic or sticky. This release has only the Burmese builds. The 13 Indic languages stay on v1.6.0-indic.2.

Install is the same as before: put the file on the SD card, then Settings > System > SD Card Firmware Update, then Settings > System > Device > Language > Burmese. It's a pre-release, so updates are by SD card only.

How it was tested

The simulator on every device profile, and an emulated X3/X4 (the ESP32-C3 in QEMU), where Burmese words come out the same as HarfBuzz, every glyph loads, and free RAM stays above 260 KB. It hasn't been on a real device yet. A reader from Myanmar is testing it on an X4 Pro right now.

If you read Burmese, tell me what's wrong, in the menu or on the page. A photo helps a lot.

Another Burmese build

After I'd built this, I found CrossInk Myanmar Edition, an earlier, separate Burmese build by someone else, for the X3/X4 on CrossInk 1.4. Nice to see I wasn't the only one who wanted this. Take a look at it too.

And if your language is still missing from CrossInk, I take commissions.