Writing system: what the characters will actually look like
A writing system is the set of characters a language is written in. Most languages use one; a few use two or more, and for those a language code without a script part tells a reader very little about what they will see. As of 2026-09-22.
| Where it appears | What can go wrong | Fixable after the fact |
|---|---|---|
| A marketing page | The wrong script for the reader | Yes, by translation |
| A subtitle file | Line breaking, character width | Yes, by reformatting |
| Text drawn inside a picture | Malformed or invented characters | No |
| A generated document | Mixed scripts in one paragraph | Yes, by editing |
Inclusion rule. Where a writing system shows up in a production, with whether a mistake can be corrected after the material exists. Order. Cheapest to fix first.
1One language, two scripts, one code
A handful of languages are written in more than one script, and for those a bare language code is close to useless: a reader who reads one script and not the other cannot tell which page they will get.
One language in this register is in that position, and the vendors declaring it use three different codes between them, one of which names a script. That is the only script information anywhere in the column.
2Scripts break the picture, not the page
Translating a page into another script is ordinary content work. Drawing characters inside a generated image is not: a model trained mostly on some scripts produces convincing shapes and nonsense words in others.
That is the one language failure in a generated production that cannot be fixed afterwards. Subtitles cannot reach it and a dub cannot either, so it has to be avoided at the script stage.
3What no vendor here publishes
Nothing in this register states which scripts a model can draw, which scripts a subtitle renderer handles, or how a right-to-left script behaves in either. One vendor claims multilingual text inside frames and names two scripts before saying others.
For a production in a non-Latin script that is the most consequential gap in the whole register, and it sits outside all three columns because no vendor publishes enough for a column to exist.
A definition, not a measurement: no vendor figure appears here that is not also in the register. The claim about text inside frames is recorded on the cell it belongs to.
Nearby terms: Mutual intelligibility, Right-to-left text. The whole vocabulary is at terms; nothing on this page is a claim about a named product.