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Welcome to Computers and Writing Systems

Scripts Around the World

Writing Systems Technology (formerly known as the Non-Roman Script Initiative)

WSTech 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, Gentium Basic, Scheherazade and Lateef 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

Note

The following list is no longer kept up-to-date. For the most recent information follow the links from our new Writing Systems Technology pages.

SIL’s Private Use Area (PUA)

UCD Spreadsheets

FontUtils Martin Hosken, Bob Hallissy, Alan Ward, David Raymond, 2016-09-08
The FontUtils package provides a plethora of command line tools for manipulating TrueType fonts. These tools are essential to NRSI's font development processes.

smith

SIL Converters

SIL Font Subsets — SIL's Writing Sysytems Technology team 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 much too large for mobile phone usage. We have now created subsets of our fonts for different regions of the world. Each regional font only contains the characters (and glyphs) that are known to be used in that region of the world. We have attempted to use the most common glyph required for that region.

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.

Unicode BMP Fallback Font Bob Hallissy, 2012-03-26
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.

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.

Using SIL Fonts on Web Pages Victor Gaultney, 2016-10-11
SIL fonts can be successfully used on web pages. There are many strategies available, and some tricks to making them work well.

Basic Set of characters needed in a Non-Roman font NRSI team, 2010-12-09
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 Bob Hallissy, 2010-11-30
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.

Articles of general interest

The NRSI Model for Implementing Writing Systems Melinda Lyons, Victor Gaultney, 2001-07-04
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 Alan Conner, 2001-01-01
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 layout design theory: What goes where? Martin Hosken, 2003-02-17
Designing a keyboard layout 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 Melinda Lyons, et al., 2001-09-01
A glossary of terms associated with implementing writing systems compiled by the NRSI.

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