The story of Sinhala Unicode is not only about assigning codes to letters. It is also the story of making those letters behave correctly on a computer—and of carrying that achievement from Harsha Wijayawardhana’s laboratory to the wider public through fonts.lk.
A symbol for Sinhala in the digital world
The Sinhala Unicode logo first appeared as the official logo of fonts.lk, one of Sri Lanka’s earliest dedicated online resources for Sinhala and Tamil Unicode implementation. The website had a deliberately simple design with a clean white background, making fonts, software, technical guidance and installation instructions easy to find.
The logo was designed by Winnie Hettigoda, with whom Harsha collaborated closely on Sinhala Unicode font development. Hettigoda created it using his newly designed Sinhala font shapes. Its colours were drawn from the colours of the Sri Lankan national flag, connecting the emerging digital identity of the Sinhala script with Sri Lanka’s cultural and national identity.
Against the white background of fonts.lk, the colourful logo became a memorable symbol of a new stage in the computerisation of Sinhala. It united the artistic form of Sinhala letters, the engineering of Unicode-compliant fonts and the national importance of enabling Sinhala to function in the digital world.
The logo also reflected the partnership behind the work. Hettigoda contributed his expertise in Sinhala letterform and glyph design, while Harsha concentrated on Unicode font architecture, OpenType rules and rendering-engine behaviour. It captured both the visible beauty of Sinhala writing and the largely invisible technical work that made digital Sinhala possible.
Encoding Sinhala was only the beginning
The inclusion of Sinhala characters in Unicode was essential, but encoding alone did not make Sinhala display correctly. Vowel signs can appear before, after, above or below a consonant. Conjunct consonants, rakaransaya, yansaya, touching letters and other special forms require several encoded characters to be transformed into a correctly positioned visual result.
A font containing drawings of Sinhala characters was therefore insufficient. A rendering engine had to interpret each sequence, select the appropriate glyphs, form conjuncts, reorder visual components and position every sign accurately. The real challenge was to make encoded Sinhala behave as a living writing system.
Experiments in Harsha’s laboratory
Harsha conducted repeated experiments with Sinhala Unicode fonts and the rules required by rendering engines. He examined how words were stored as Unicode sequences and compared them with the completed syllables expected by Sinhala readers. His task was to translate the linguistic and visual behaviour of the script into precise instructions a computer could execute.
He worked with tools including Microsoft VOLT, FontLab, Fontographer and FontForge, developing and testing OpenType substitution and positioning rules. Consonant-and-vowel combinations, conjuncts, rakaransaya, yansaya, touching letters, reordered components and contextual substitutions all had to be tested. A rule that solved one combination could create a problem in another, so the work required careful iteration across many words and letter sequences.
The turning point came when Unicode-encoded Sinhala rendered correctly in Harsha’s laboratory. The engine applied the shaping rules, selected the required glyphs and assembled recognisable Sinhala words instead of disconnected or incorrectly positioned components.
For the first time in his laboratory, Harsha saw encoded Sinhala transformed into properly formed, readable writing. The result demonstrated that the barrier was not inherent in the language: it could be overcome by accurately interpreting Sinhala script behaviour and expressing it through font and rendering-engine rules.
Harsha regards finally cracking Sinhala Unicode font rendering as his greatest contribution to the Sinhala language. It bridged the gap between assigning Unicode values to characters and enabling people to use Sinhala meaningfully in documents, databases, websites, email and software applications.
Sarasavi Unicode
The laboratory experiments contributed to the development and testing of Sarasavi Unicode. Hettigoda concentrated on Sinhala letterforms and glyph shapes, while Harsha experimented with the Unicode rules and rendering-engine behaviour required to activate those forms under the correct linguistic conditions.
Sarasavi Unicode showed that Sinhala Unicode was not merely a theoretical encoding standard. A standards-compliant font could cooperate with a rendering engine and become a functioning technology for real users.
From the BMP to the SMP
The principal Sinhala Unicode block is located in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) at U+0D80–U+0DFF. This block contains the main characters used for modern Sinhala writing and was the focus of the original font-rendering work. Sinhala Lith Illakkam digits were subsequently encoded at U+0DE6–U+0DEF.
The distinction between characters and glyphs is central to this history. A Unicode character is an encoded textual identity; a glyph is its visible form. Several characters may need to be combined, reordered or substituted before the reader sees the correctly formed Sinhala result. Harsha’s laboratory work addressed this crucial transformation.
Harsha’s later research into historic Sinhala numerals extended the digital representation of the language. The signs called Sinhala Archaic Numbers, or Sinhala Illakkam, occupy U+111E0–U+111FF in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP), with the twenty number signs at U+111E1–U+111F4.
This later work is chronologically distinct from the initial rendering breakthrough. The BMP represents the modern script that Harsha first made operational through font-engineering rules; the SMP represents the later international encoding and preservation of historic Sinhala numerical signs. Together they connect contemporary digital communication with Sri Lanka’s mathematical and cultural inheritance.
From the laboratory to fonts.lk
Solving the rendering problem was only the beginning. The technology had to reach developers, font designers, institutions and ordinary users. Through the Software Development Unit of the University of Colombo School of Computing, fonts.lk was developed during 2004–2005 as a specialised resource for Sinhala and Tamil Unicode implementation.
The clean white website placed practical resources—and Hettigoda’s distinctive Sinhala Unicode logo—at the centre. It provided a bridge between standards work and everyday implementation, helping users move from incompatible legacy-font systems to standards-compliant text. fonts.lk represented the movement of Sinhala Unicode from research and experimentation into public use.
Standards, guidance and national implementation
Harsha contributed through the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka’s Local Language Working Group and the Sri Lanka Standards Institution. He participated in the second revision of SLS 1134 and later edited its third revision. Standardisation allowed Sinhala created on one computer to be opened, searched and edited on another without losing its meaning.
Documenting the method
Harsha wrote the introduction to, and co-edited with Aruni Goonetilleke, the Guide to Creating Sinhala and Tamil Unicode Fonts. By documenting characters, glyphs, font metrics, TrueType, OpenType and font-development tools, the guide made this knowledge available to future font designers and software developers.
More than a font
Before standards-compliant Unicode, many Sinhala documents depended on incompatible legacy fonts and did not contain meaningful Sinhala text underneath their appearance. Correct encoding made Sinhala searchable, transferable and preservable; correct rendering made it readable.
The work supported Sinhala use in websites, databases, email, electronic government, search engines, education, digital archives, desktop and mobile applications, and internationalised domain names. It was never merely the creation of another typeface—it was the engineering needed to give Sinhala a reliable place within modern information systems.
The enduring meaning of the logo
The Sinhala Unicode logo created by Winnie Hettigoda remains a symbol of this journey. Its Sinhala letterforms represented the artistic inheritance of the language; its national colours connected the work with Sri Lanka; and its association with fonts.lk represented the effort to place fonts and technical knowledge in the hands of the public.
Behind the logo stood character encoding, glyph design, OpenType engineering, rendering experiments, keyboard standards, collaboration, documentation and public education. The first successful rendering in Harsha’s laboratory was the moment encoded Sinhala became visibly and practically usable. fonts.lk carried that achievement beyond the laboratory, while the later BMP and SMP work connected modern communication with Sri Lanka’s historic writing and numerical traditions.
This was not simply a technical accomplishment. It was part of a broader effort to ensure that Sinhala—one of the world’s historic living languages—would have a functional, standards-compliant and enduring place in the digital future.
Sources: ICT History of Sri Lanka — Harsha Wijayawardhana; ICT History — Language Technology; Unicode implementation and rendering history; ICTA font resources; Unicode Sinhala chart; and Unicode Sinhala Archaic Numbers chart. The account of the logo’s design, colours and first appearance on fonts.lk is based on Harsha Wijayawardhana’s personal record.