The Ministry of Culture of Armenia submitted a draft resolution to the Armenian Government proposing the use of Unicode in all the official e-documents. Two fonts, “Grapalat” and “Mariam”, designed by Edik Gabuzyan will be used.

The old ASCII-character set has so far been installed in computers (including computers at government agencies). The ASCII-character set lacks some characters (for example, the AMD character and the number sign) and does not meet the National Standards of Armenian Fonts.

Sylfaen is mainly used for Internet. However, experts of the RA Ministry of Culture say it does not meet the standards, as it is difficult to read on the screen.

According to the draft resolution, the absence of Armenian Unicode fonts in the original program packages restricts the use of Armenian texts in operating the programs. Websites are mostly using Cyrillic or Latin alphabets, while most Armenian websites are impossible to visit without special fonts.

The draft resolution also says that Armenian designers created Armenian characters mostly used in the Arial and Times fonts without agreeing them with the foreign institutions holding the copyright. So their use in Armenia is a breach of copyright.

By introducing the new fonts, the RA Government also wants to resolve another important problem, namely, preserving and developing the national cultural heritage, particularly, fonts.