A Study of Traditional Mongolian Script Encodings and Rendering: Use of Unicode in OpenType fonts

This article discusses the rendering issues of complex text layouts, particularly traditional Mongolian script. Some standards such as Unicode and OpenType format have been implemented and are supported widely. Traditional Mongolian script has been standardized in Unicode. We analyzed existing OpenType fonts and their rendering schemes for traditional Mongolian script. We found some errors, and discovered grammatical rules, which are not documented in international standard and guidelines. None of the existing OpenType fonts was complete. This article provides some improvements and recommendations for future development of traditional Mongolian OpenType fonts. Furthermore, this article discusses the issues of traditional Mongolian script encoding. There are several non-Unicode encodings and code pages that have been developed, some of which are still commonly used. This diversity of character encodings, code pages and keyboard drivers make it difficult to incorporate enriched Unicode content. We analyzed existing non-Unicode encodings and code pages of traditional Mongolian script. Developing text conversion technique from diverse encodings to Unicode is becoming an essential demand in order to adopt already available digital content in traditional Mongolian script easily. Authors encourage developers to use the standardized code points of Unicode and the Unicode based encodings in traditional Mongolian script.