Welcome

This site is a collection of resources for supporting alphabets, scripts, and writing systems on digital devices and communication platforms. It is more of a library than an encyclopedia, and is intended for a wide range of people—from beginners to experts. Over time this will become the long-term home for much of the information currently on other SIL Writing Systems Technology sites, including ScriptSource, Font Development Best Practices, SIL Font Development Guide, and scripts.sil.org.

Guides

Application Development Best Practice is a thorough guide for developers who want their software to be able to handle a wide range of global writing systems.

Font Design and Development covers many of the tools and technical issues involved in creating fonts, particularly for complex writing systems.

Building and Modifying SIL Fonts covers the processes and techniques for adapting SIL’s free and openly licensed fonts for specific needs.

What other Guides do you want? Contact us!

Featured Articles

• Finding & Using Fonts
• What is a Writing System?
• The Writing Systems Computing Model
• Language Tagging
• Unicode Bidi Algorithm
• CLDR & SLDR
• Line Metrics
• Font & Style Naming
• Copyright & Licensing
• Unicode Concepts

Finding Information

Use the Search bar at the top of the page.

Browse the sidebar or menu to discover main articles—click on the Topic names to explore.

Look up words and technical terms in the comprehensive Glossary.

What information are you looking for? Contact us!

Scripts & Languages

Discover information on individual scripts and languages starting with the Scripts Index.

Individual script pages provide detail on script properties, languages that use the script, Unicode status, relevant articles, and links to the rich collection of information on ScriptSource

See Languages for links to keyboards and specific language information on the Ethnologue and other websites.