This page selects a few items that attempt to explain how scripts work in a way that is accessible to both the beginner and the script expert. For more, see the links to the right.
Choose a script to quickly locate information about it.
You can now also apply a rough filter for active, limited or historic use, and highlight recent or liturgical scripts.
Get information about key characteristics of a number of orthographies. It is not intended to be exhaustively scientific, but the interactive table gives an idea of what orthographies require what type of feature support.
Orthography descriptions
Notes summarising the key features of a given script or orthography. Also notes on typographic conventions.
By orthography
By script
Adlam • Arabic • Balinese • Bamum • Bassa Vah • Bengali • Buginese • Cherokee • Cyrillic • Devanagari • Ethiopic • Georgian • Greek • Gujarati • Gurmukhi • Hanifi Rohingya • Hebrew • Javanese • Kayah Li • Khmer • Lao • Latin • Lisu • Malayalam • Mandaic • Myanmar • N’Ko • Newa • New Tai Lü • Oriya • Ol Chiki • Osage • Sinhala • Sundanese • Syriac • Tai Le • Tai Tham • Tai Viet • Tamil • Telugu • Thaana • Thai • Tibetan • Tifinagh • Vai
Allows quick comparisons across the various orthographic information.
Character notes
Character-by-character notes for Unicode blocks used by the scripts listed below.
For anyone who wants to better understand how scripts work in computerised environments, and more particularly with regards to Unicode. The material should be accessible for a wide audience, from developers to managers, and comes with a set of interactive pages that explore the examples and scripts in the tutorial.
Arabic • Cyrillic • Devanagari • Greek • Han • Hangul • Hebrew • Japanese • Latin • Thai • Tibetan • Word wrap tester
Find characters used by a particular language, or languages that use a given non-ASCII character.
Character apps are likely to be most useful if you don't know a script well enough to use the native keyboard. The arrangement of characters also makes it much more useable than a regular character map utility, and they may include characters from more than one block. However, character apps also provide transliteration and other tools, and are as useful for analysing text as for inputting it.
Text samples for most of the scripts supported in Unicode.
Provides a (not exhaustive) list of fonts, grouped by script, that are available via the Windows 10 and Mac OS X operating systems, as well as Google's Noto fonts and SIL fonts.
Parses a string and shows extended grapheme cluster boundaries (except for Korean jamo and emoji character sequences).
Generates a matrix of conjunct forms for a given complex script. Allows you to inspect the results for a given font.
Generates a matrix of consonant+vowel pairings.
Find links to more script-related articles on the Doc list page and the App list page.