Introduction

This document specifies how the Mongolian script is encoded and shaped. For each writing system—Hudum, Todo, Sibe, and Manchu, with their Ali Gali extensions—it fixes the characters and the step-by-step shaping rules that turn a sequence of characters into written units, aligned with the Unicode Standard and China’s national standards. It covers the model, the rules of each writing system, the history behind them, and the datasets and toolchain that maintain them.

The model—the character and glyph layers, and the two directions between them—is described in Architecture.
Each writing system is specified on its own page: Hudum, Todo, Sibe, and Manchu, together with their Ali Gali extensions (Hudum Ali Gali, Todo Ali Gali, Manchu Ali Gali).
The punctuation, digits, and other characters outside the cursive letters are treated in Non-joining characters.
A font that has to cover the whole Mongolian block is treated in Single-font implementation.
The history behind this model is recounted in Background.
The phonemes of each language are listed in Phonology.
The relationship to the Unicode Standard, and the difference from the data it still carries, is stated in Relationship to the Unicode Standard.
Comparisons with other standards and implementations are made in Comparison.
The data, the library, the templates, and the tests are described in Toolchain.

Toolchain

The repository maintains this document and the data behind it:

The specification data live in data/, the single source of truth (README).
The library and the tests live in mongfontbuilder/, and the package is published to PyPI (README).
The Glyphs templates live in templates/ (README).
This documentation is the site built from the pages in docs/; the README and CONTRIBUTING describe how to run and contribute to it.