[3] The Mon-Burmese script is distinguished from Khmer-derived scripts (e.g., Khmer and Thai) by its basis on Pali orthography (they traditionally lack Sanskrit letters representing the sibilants <ś> and <ṣ> and the vocalic sonorants <ṛ> and <ḷ>), the use of a virāma, and the round shape of letters.

The Old Mon script of Dvaravati (present-day central Thailand), derived from Grantha (Pallava), has conjecturally been dated to the 6th to 8th centuries AD.

[6] According to the then prevailing mainstream scholarship, Mon inscriptions from the Dvaravati period appeared in present-day northern Thailand and Laos.

Around the 14th century, a model of the Mon–Burmese script from northern Thailand was adapted for religious purposes, to correctly write Pali in full etymological spelling.

[14] The script has been adapted for use in writing several languages of Burma other than Mon and Burmese, most notably in modern times Shan and S'gaw Karen.

Until 2005, most Burmese-language websites used an image-based, dynamically-generated method to display Burmese characters, often in GIF or JPEG.

At the end of 2005, the Burmese NLP Research Lab announced a Myanmar OpenType font named Myanmar1.

This font contains not only Unicode code points and glyphs but also the OpenType Layout (OTL) logic and rules.

Initially, it required a Graphite engine, though now OpenType tables for Windows are in the current version of this font.

It is important to note that these Burmese fonts are not Unicode compliant, because they use unallocated code points (including those for the Latin script) in the Burmese block to manually deal with shaping—that would normally be done by a complex text layout engine—and they are not yet supported by Microsoft and other major software vendors.

to use a pseudo-Unicode font called Zawgyi (which uses codepoints allocated for minority languages and does not efficiently render diacritics, such as the size of ya-yit) or the GIF/JPG display method.