This document points to resources for the layout and presentation of text in languages that use the Latin script. The target audience includes developers of Web standards and technologies, such as HTML, CSS, Mobile Web, Digital Publications, and Unicode, as well as implementers of web browsers, ebook readers, and other applications that need to render Latin text.
This document points to resources for Latin script layout and text support on the Web and in eBooks. These requirements provide information for Web technologies such as CSS, HTML and digital publications about how to support languages written using the Latin script. The information here is developed in conjunction with a document that summarises gaps where the Web fails to adequately support the Latin script.
The editor's draft of this document is being developed in the GitHub repository European Language Enablement (eurlreq), with contributors from the W3C Internationalization Interest Group. It is published by the Internationalization Working Group. The end target for this document is a Working Group Note.
To make it easier to track comments, please raise separate issues or emails for each comment, and point to the section you are commenting on using a URL.
Some links on this page point to repositories or pages to which information will be added over time. Initially, the link may produce no results, but as issues, tests, etc. are created they will show up.
Links that have a gray color led to no content the last time this document was updated. They are still live, however, since relevant content could be added at any time. When the document is updated, links that now point to results will have their live colour restored.
The initial version of this document was prepared by Richard Ishida.
See also the GitHub contributors list for the Europe Language Enablement project, and the discussions related to the Latin script.
This document points to resources for Latin script layout and text support on the Web and in eBooks. These resources provide information for developers of Web technologies such as CSS, HTML and digital publications, and for application developers, about how to support languages written using the Latin script. They include requirements, tests, GitHub discussions, type samples, and more,
This document should be used alongside a separate document, Latin Script Gap Analysis, which describes gaps in language support for users of the Latin script, and prioritises and describes the impact of those gaps on the user.
Gap reports are brought to the attention of spec and browser implementers, and are tracked via the Gap Analysis Pipeline. (Filter for Latin script items)
The document Language enablement index points to this document and others, and provides a central location for developers and implementers to find information related to various scripts.
The W3C also has a repository with discussion threads related to the Latin script, including requests from developers to the user community for information about how scripts/languages work, and a notification system that tracks issues in W3C working groups related to the Latin script. See a list of unresolved questions for Latin experts. Each section below points to related discussions. See also the repository home page.
The Latin script is an alphabet. It is largely phonetic in nature, where each letter represents a basic sound, and all vowel sounds are written using letters. However, many languages are written using a Latin script orthography, and the correspondences between sounds and letters can vary significantly.
Many languages are written only in the Latin script, whereas others use the Latin script as an alternative to another script. The Latin script is also widely used for romanized and phonetic transcriptions of text in other scripts.
Latin script text is written horizontally in rows the progress from top to bottom.
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