Historically, the Bugis script was used to write the Buginese, Makassarese and Bimanese languages. Although it is no longer used for everyday communication, it is used for ornamental purposes and special occasions. There are also local endeavours to teach the script in schools and some modern reforms to the writing system have been adopted to accommodate this effort. It has even been used to write Indonesian.

The Buginese script requires a few special features, including graphic transposition and ligatures, to display text properly but these things are all handled automatically by the features in our font. We also provide support for some modern punctuation marks not specifically included in Unicode as well as two different variants used to display final consonants (these are modern innovations as traditional use of the script does not provide for this).

The term ‘Buginese’ is commonly used but we have opted for the more natural name ‘Lontara.’ It is expected that the Unicode Consortium will adopt the same designation.

The Lontara (Buginese) Language Kit for OS X comes with one font (shown above) and one phonetic keyboard layout.