SIL International has been described by one industry representative as "vastly multilingual". It is a non-profit organisation involved in linguistic research and language development activities such as literacy and literature development, primarily focusing on lesser-known languages throughout the world. In the past 60+ years, SIL has engaged in projects in over 1,800 languages.

The languages in which SIL linguists have worked involve a very wide variety of writing systems using non-standard character sets. Significant challenges have been faced in creating computer implementations for these writing systems, and solutions have not always been ideal: generally, the linguists would live with any solution provided it got the shapes they needed onto paper. For situations such as these, Unicode offers major benefits since it provides a basis for standards-based solutions that are supported by off-the-shelf software and that are potentially adequate for most or all of these thousands of different writing systems. Adoption of Unicode throughout this vastly multilingual organisation presents a number of challenges of its own, however.

This presentation offers a case study in the support of a wide variety of writing system implementations both with and without Unicode. It reviews some of the innovative solutions used in the past, and the challenges being faced in making a transition from that very diverse collection of legacy solutions to new solutions based on Unicode.