Directionality Studio
Scripts do not all run the same way. Four directions, four living examples.
Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, and most of the world
Arabic, Hebrew, N'Ko, Adlam, Thaana
Mongolian — columns run left to right
ΑΛΦΑΒΗΤΟΝ
ΑΛΦΑΒΗΤΟΝ
How early Greek ran — "as the ox plows". Rongorongo used a reverse form (see the Undeciphered Vault).
The Tofu Room
When a character has no glyph to show, you get □ — a blank box the type world calls "tofu". This whole building is set in Noto, whose name is a contraction of "no tofu".
What your device shows for a character it cannot render.
Two things cause tofu. First, the character is simply not encoded in Unicode at all — there is no code point, so there is nothing for any font to render. This is the case for the Proto-Sinaitic ancestor and the Indus signs: the marks exist on stone, but not yet in the standard.
Second, the character is encoded, but the reader's device lacks a font that covers it — the code point is valid, yet no glyph is installed to draw it. This is exactly the problem Noto was built to end: one type family spanning every script in Unicode. If you see □ anywhere in these halls, your device is missing a Noto font — the very problem on display here. The unencoded cases live down in the Undeciphered Vault.
Specimen Press
Set any script in the collection live. Choose a script, drag the size, and type — every specimen renders in its own Noto face.
The Keyboard Room
How do you actually type a script? Not all the same way. Pick a layout to see its real, standard keyboard — the Latin legend in the corner of each key, the script's own character on the cap. The three letter rows are shown; toggle the Shift layer to see how a script with more signs than keys overflows.
Three ways a script meets a keyboard. Direct — one key per sign, Latin and script sharing each cap (Russian ЙЦУКЕН, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew). Layered — more signs than keys, so Shift and the number row carry the overflow (Cherokee's 85 syllables). Composition — far too many signs for any keyboard: Chinese is typed in Pinyin and chosen from a candidate list; Japanese is typed as romaji or kana and converted; Korean types single jamo that the system assembles live into syllable blocks — the bridge between a keyboard and an input method.
Letter-row layouts transcribed from the shipping keyboard drivers via kbdlayout.info and standards documentation. Cherokee is the Cherokee Nation layout (positional, not phonetic); its number-row syllables are omitted here.