This material was initially developed for delivery as a regularly-featured tutorial at Internationalization & Unicode Conferences.

The tutorial will provide you with an understanding of key requirements for implementing writing systems in information technology. It will do this by examining real examples of a wide range of modern scripts to discover features that a computerized implementation must support.

It will also introduce many of the key terms used to describe script features or characters in the Unicode Standard. When a slide introduces a particular concept, relevant terms are shown in the slide title.

The tutorial does not provide detailed coding or technical advice, but does provide the essential background information you need to understand the fundamental issues. It will also constitute an excellent orientation for newcomers to the topic, providing a wide-ranging framework that assists in assimilating further, more detailed and specific information.

Naturally, given the tutorial format this is an ambitious approach, and it will mean that we cannot go into great detail on any particular topic. If you would like to understand a topic better, there are a couple of excellent resources cited at the end of this page, one of which is the very readable Unicode Standard itself.