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Balinese is a language of the Austronesian family of languages, ostensibly spoken by about three million people on the island of Bali, Indonesia, and among some Balinese immigrant communities on other Indonesian islands (although latest reports from the government of Bali suggest that actual number of Balinese speakers is now closer to 1 million.)

Balinese script, or Aksara Bali, is an abugida that was derived from the Old Kawi script, which ultimately derived from the Brahmi script, the root of all the Indic and Southeast Asian scripts. The earliest known inscriptions were from the 11th century AD. An abugida, also known as an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system in which consonant vowel sequences are written as a unit. In the case of Balinese, each character is compromised of a consonant along with the vowel “a.”

Although Balinese script is taught to all Balinese children in grammar school, the use of Balinese script has been largely superseded by Latin script, due to the influx of Indonesian, the national language, and, as of late, the increasing use of electronic communication for which Balinese script has been problematic.

In 1988, I Made Suatjana first attempted to create a font for Aksara Bali using the DOS based ChiWriter. There was a lot of excitement about this effort, but the font was difficult to use and the letters weren't as rounded and connected as the writing system required. In 1996, I Made Suatjana improved the shape of the letters by creating a Windows based font, called Bali Simbar. The font was better shaped, although it was still quite difficult to use because of the idiosyncrasies of Aksara Bali, which has letters changing shape and moving above or below the line depending on where they occur relative to other characters.

In 2005 a seminar was held for the purpose of entering Aksara Bali into Unicode and ISO 10646, sponsored by the Balinese Government Department of Culture and Yayasan Bali Galang, a foundation promoting the use of Askara Bali (Balinese script) under the direction of Donny Harimurti and his sons Bemby Bantara Narendra and Dendy Narendra. The following year, Balinese script was entered into Unicode, although it was categorized as "still having some difficulties."

There are now two fonts available for Aksara Bali: Bali Simbar Dwijendra, developed by I Made Suatjana written in Visual Basic which uses the program Keyman to manipulate the keyboard for Microsoft Word; and Bali Galang Smart Font, developed by Donny Harimurti and his sons, which can only be used with applications which are integrated with the Graphite engine (for example, Firefox with Graphite enabled, and Open Office). We are grateful to the engineers at Google for allowing Aksara Bali to be used as a web font.