NRSI: Computers & Writing Systems
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Short URL: http://scripts.sil.org/default
Welcome to Computers and Writing Systems
Click on the map above to watch animated presentations on scripts. Requires 
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The Non-Roman Script Initiative
The NRSI is a department of SIL International, whose task is to provide assistance,
research and development for SIL International and its partners to support the use of non-Roman and complex
scripts in language development.
Our vision is that language communities are effectively using their preferred writing system on computers without technical barriers.
Google Web Fonts
Andika and Gentium
Basic are now available for use on web pages via the Google Web Fonts service! This makes it
very easy for you to use on your website. For more information on this and other ways to use SIL fonts on
web sites see Using SIL Fonts on Web Pages.
Recent additions and updates
Roman Script to Arabic Script
Conversion
The SIL Converters software provide the framework to convert your texts from Roman script to Arabic script.
This document is not a manual of SIL Converters or the TECkit mapping language but attempts to highlight some
principles that need to be considered when converting text from Roman script to Arabic script.
Doulos SIL Cipher
The Cipher music notation is used throughout Indonesia and China for all kinds of music. The font is not
intended for general orthographic use. This solution is primarily intended for fairly straightforward
songbooks for singers, not for complex instrumental music. It can handle harmony lines fine, but not a lot of
intricacies or subtleties (e.g. no staccato).
Tai Heritage Pro
Tai Heritage Pro, version 2.5 is now available in regular and bold faces, with both OpenType and Graphite
rendering. This Unicode font continues the tradition of the Tai Heritage typeface, which is designed to
reflect the traditional hand-written style of the Tai Viet script.
Annapurna SIL Fonts
Annapurna SIL is a Unicode-based font family with support for the many diverse languages that use Devanagari
script to produce readable, high-quality publications. The design is intended to be highly readable,
reasonably compact, and visually attractive. These fonts are named after the majestic Annapurna mountain
range of Nepal.
The Mondulkiri Font Family
The Mondulkiri fonts provide Unicode support for the Khmer script. These fonts are provided free of charge.
Previous versions of the fonts have been available since 2003 but are now available on the SIL website. There
are four main fonts available. The Khmer Mondulkiri font has just been updated and now also works on Mac OS
X.
Nastaliq Character Set
Recommendations
Developing comprehensive fonts can be quite a challenge. There are over 340 characters in the Arabic Unicode
blocks (not including the presentations forms). For many of those characters, there are up to 4 different
forms. An Arabic script font can require many, many glyphs.
When you get to the needs for Nastaliq (slanted style), the size of font is increased exponentially. We have
taken a survey of the required character needs for a Nastaliq style font and listed them here. This list is
smaller than the complete list of Arabic script characters. Our hope is that all type designers who are
designing fonts for the Nastaliq style will be willing to add these characters to their fonts. This would be
a great service to the languages using Nastaliq.
SIL Corporate PUA
Assignments
Reference information on Unicode private-use character assignments used within SIL International. Revised for
Unicode 6.1.
New
and improved Graphite website! Most recently: Version 4.2 of the Graphite compiler has been released for
Windows, and Firefox 11+ now includes Graphite support.
FontUtils
The FontUtils package provides a plethora of command line tools for manipulating TrueType fonts. These tools
are essential to NRSI's font development processes.
SIL Font Subsets
SIL's Non-Roman Script Initiative has created very comprehensive fonts for Latin and Cyrillic character sets.
These are very large fonts that cover just about every need we know about in the Latin and Cyrillic world.
Now, as we move into the age of mobile phone and web usage, everyone wants fonts that are small and compact.
Our fonts are over a megabyte each and that is considered way too big for mobile phone usage.
We are now considering ways to subset our fonts. Current commercial font subsetting schemes remove the smart
font information from a font when it subsets a font. While this may be acceptable for majority languages, we
consider this unacceptable as so many languages in the world require smart diacritic positioning above and/or
below base characters.
Ukelele
Ukelele is a Unicode keyboard layout editor for Mac OS X versions 10.2 and later. Version 2.2.4 is available
for download, and can be used on Mac OS X 10.4 and later. The previous stable release of Ukelele, version
1.8.4 (universal binary, for Mac OS X 10.2 and later) is still available for download. This version works on
Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) to 10.8 (Mountain Lion).
Unicode BMP Fallback
Font
Intended for debugging, this font contains a glyph for every character in the Basic Multilingual plane
(including Private Use Area) of Unicode 6.1, each glyph consisting of a box enclosing the four hex digits
identifying the Unicode scalar value.
Namdhinggo SIL
The Namdhinggo SIL Unicode font for the Limbu script is still in development. However, we believe the font is
useful in its present state and thus we are releasing it as a "Font in Development".
Encore2Unicode update for Unicode 6.1.
Encore2Unicode is a command-line utility for Windows that can examine a font built using the Encore font
system and create a draft TECkit mapping table for converting data using that font to
(and back from) Unicode.
Unicode Character Properties
Excel Workbook
Various files from the Unicode Character Database (6.1) compiled into an Excel workbook.
SIL Corporate PUA
Assignments
Reference information on Unicode private-use character assignments used within SIL International. Revised for
Unicode 6.1.
Charis SIL
13 Sept and 25 Aug 2011 — Two recent updates! These two updates include fixing line-spacing/clipping issues
and encoding official Unicode codepoints for all PUA characters which were added to Unicode 5.2 and 6.0. No
new characters were added.
Charis SIL is a Unicode-encoded serif font. Besides having a comprehensive inventory of glyphs needed for
almost any Roman- or Cyrillic-based writing system, it also contains the entire inventory of the
International Phonetic Alphabet. It has built-in “smart-font” capabilities, so diacritics are properly
placed.
Charis is similar to Bitstream Charter, one of the first fonts designed specifically for laser printers. It
is highly readable and holds up well in less-than-ideal reproduction environments. It also has a full set of
styles - regular, italic, bold, bold italic - and so is more useful in general publishing than Doulos SIL. Charis is a serif, proportionally-spaced font optimized for
readability in long printed documents.
Doulos SIL
13 Sept and 25 Aug 2011 — Two recent updates! These two updates include fixing line-spacing/clipping issues
and encoding official Unicode codepoints for all PUA characters which were added to Unicode 5.2 and 6.0. No
new characters were added.
Doulos SIL is a Unicode-encoded serif font similar to Times New Roman. Besides having a comprehensive
inventory of glyphs needed for almost any Roman- or Cyrillic-based writing system, it also contains the
entire inventory of the International Phonetic Alphabet. It has built-in “smart-font” capabilities, so
diacritics are properly placed.
Doulos is very similar to Times/Times New Roman, but only has a single face - regular. It is intended for use
alongside other Times-like fonts where a range of styles (italic, bold) are not needed.
Gentium — a typeface for the
nations
13 Sept and 25 Aug 2011 — Two recent updates! These two updates include fixing line-spacing/clipping issues
and encoding official Unicode codepoints for all PUA characters which were added to Unicode 5.2 and 6.0. No
new characters were added.
Home page for the Gentium, Gentium Basic and Gentium Plus fonts.
Gentium is a typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin
script to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and
includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode.
Andika
2011-09-12 — New Release! There were some major line-spacing/clipping issues and we hope these are resolved
in this version.
Andika is a sans serif, Unicode-compliant font designed especially for literacy use, taking into account the
needs of beginning readers. The focus is on clear, easy-to-perceive letterforms that will not be readily
confused with one another.
Padauk Font
Padauk is a smart font capable of rendering Burmese and the Myanmar script.
Using SIL Fonts on Web
Pages
2011-07-28 Andika and Gentium Basic are now available for use on web pages via the Google Web Fonts service,
with more to follow in the future.
SIL fonts can be successfully used on web pages. There are many strategies available, and some tricks to
making them work well.
Abyssinica SIL
Home page for the Abyssinica SIL font. Abyssinica SIL supports all Ethiopic characters which are in Unicode
including the Unicode 6.0 extensions. As far as we are aware, all languages of Ethiopia are now fully
represented in Unicode.
Basic Set of characters needed in a
Non-Roman font
Some people have asked what a basic character set for a Non-Roman font should include (besides the Non-Roman
characters). The chart on this page is our recommendation for a basic set of characters. It includes the
union of Windows CP1252 and Mac-Roman.
SIL TypeTuner Web
TypeTuner Web (or TTW) is a web delivery system for customized versions of SIL fonts. Now including: Andika,
Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Gentium Plus, Lateef and Scheherazade.
SILConverters 3.1.1
This package provides tools through which you can change the encoding, font, and/or script of text in
Microsoft Word and other Office documents, XML documents, and SFM text and lexicon documents. It also
installs a system-wide repository to manage your encoding converters and transliterators (TECkit, CC, ICU,
Perl, or Python-based, as well as support for adding custom transduction engines).
Articles of general interest
The NRSI Model for Implementing
Writing Systems
Over its short history, the Non-Roman Script Initiative of SIL International has developed a model for using
computers to implement the various writing systems that are needed for text input, storage, processing, and
output.
The Digital Divide
SIL chartered the Non-Roman Script Initiative (NRSI) to enable ethnic minorities to bridge the digital
divide. NRSI participates in the work of the Unicode Consortium, an international nonprofit founded to
establish a universal standard for representing each character of all the world's writing systems on the
computer.
An introduction to keyboard design
theory: What goes where?
Designing a keyboard is relatively easy: you just allocate codepoints to keystrokes. The difficulty comes
when trying to decide what codepoints to assign to what keystrokes. Do you design based around the characters
on the keytops of a user's keyboard or the relative position of the keys? What do you do if you want to be
able to type more characters than there are keys in your keyboard?
Glossary
A glossary of terms associated with implementing writing systems compiled by the NRSI.
Backlinks (20 most popular; affiliated sites and popular search engines removed)
http://blackboard.stonybrook.edu/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_8943_1
http://digilander.libero.it/SFranz/linguist.htm
http://www.philologie.com/
http://neiu.blackboard.com/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_2044_
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