Text Standards for the “Rest of World”: The Making of the Unicode Standard and the OpenType Format

This article traces the development of the set of technologies that enabled multilingual digital written communication, focusing on the Unicode Standard, the bottom layer of what becomes “text stack,” and the OpenType Format (OTF), an important technical layer that augments the Unicode Standard. Though it had a critical role in making non-Latin writing systems usable on computers, popular accounts of OTF only situate it as the solution to the 1980s’ industry “font wars”—infighting between computer companies to establish a technically superior technology for Latin typesetting. Instead, it is positioned here as an advancement in software internationalization. While this article considers the possibilities for multilingual text writ large, it focuses most on the family of Indic scripts. We see how Indic scripts were initially handled by Unicode—in secondary layers and with naïveté—ultimately producing a complex, under-specified system.