This document is the first of a series of three recording the output of the second phase of UNU/IIST's MultiScript project. It explains the basic structure of multi-directional, multi-lingual documents and some related auxiliary concepts (including how locations within such a document can be determined) and gives a formal specification of this in the RAISE specification language, RSL. This modifies and extends the preliminary specification in the UNU/IIST report No 75. The other documents in this series cover the display and printing, UNU/IIST report No 112, and the creation and editing, UNU/IIST report No 113, of such documents.
This document is the second of a series of three recording the output of the second phase of UNU/IIST's MultiScript project. It extends the description and the formal specification of multi-directional, multi-lingual documents presented in the UNU/IIST report 105 to cover the display and printing of such documents. The third document in the series, UNU/IIST report 113, covers the creation and editing of multi-directional, multi-lingual documents.
Traditional Mongolian script has recently been the subject of an international standardisation process within the scope of ISO/IEC 10646, which specifies an encoding scheme covering the set of characters occurring in the written forms of all the world's languages together with more general symbols~(punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, and so on). This paper gives an overview of this encoding and the principles on which it is based and explains how the full range of positional variants of characters and of ligatures are obtained from it.
