Complex text layout
typesetting of writing systems in which the shape or positioning of a grapheme depends on its relation to other graphemes, including bidirectional text, context-sensitive shaping and ligatures, and reordering logical order to graphic order
Complex text layout (CTL) or complex text rendering is the typesetting of writing systems in which the shape or positioning of a grapheme depends on its relation to other graphemes. The term is used in the field of software internationalization, where each grapheme is a character.
Scripts which require CTL for proper display may be known as complex scripts. Examples include the Arabic script and scripts of the Brahmic family, such as Devanagari, Khmer script or the Thai script. Many scripts do not require CTL. For instance, the basic characters of Latin script or Chinese characters can be typeset by simply displaying each character one after another in straight rows or columns. However, even these scripts have alternate forms or optional features (such as cursive writing) which require CTL to produce on computers. CTL is required to display all character sequences (consisting of Latin base letter and diacritics) of the European Unicode Subset DIN 91379.
Characteristics requiring CTL
The main characteristics of CTL complexity are:
Bi-directional text, where characters may be written from either right-to-left or left-to-right direction.
Context-sensitive shaping and ligatures, where a character may change its shape, dependent on its location and/or the surrounding characters. For example, a character in Arabic script can have as many as four different shape-forms, depending on context.
“Complex text layout” enters the record as typesetting of writing systems in which the shape or positioning of a grapheme depends on its relation to other graphemes, including bidirectional text, context-sensitive shaping and ligatures, and reordering logical order to graphic order. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Complex, text and layout can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1121609. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Complex text layout” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.