The World’s Writing Systems
In the beginning was the letter
Sure, but which one? The Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT) in Nancy, France, the Institut Designlabor Gutenberg (IDG) of the Mainz University of Applied Sciences and the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI), Department of Linguistics of the University of California, Berkeley have been dealing with this question for three and a half years. A first answer can now be found here, in the TWWS online compendium. It is the first step of the long-term study "The Missing Scripts Project", which looks for the writing systems that are still missing in Unicode. As of today, there are still 146.
A challenge for script researchers and designers was to ensure that the correct classifications were used and not mere alphabets raised to the rank of a writing system. And another, to develop a synoptical font which would combine a single representative character for each system.