Orthography in Latin characters

In some situations, Taiwanese is written with the Latin alphabet using an orthography called POJ, meaning "vernacular writing". POJ was developed first by Presbyterian missionaries and later by the indigenous Presbyterian Church in Taiwan they have been active in promoting the language since the late 19th century. Recently there has been an increase in texts using a mixed orthography of Han characters and romanization, although these texts remain uncommon. Other Latin-based orthographies exist, the most significant being Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet (TLPA), Daighi tongiong pingim (DT), Ganvsig daighix tongiong pingimv (GDT), Modern Literal Taiwanese (MLT), Simplified MLT (SMLT), and Phofsit Daibuun (PSDB). GDT, MLT, SMLT and PSDB employ tonal spelling to indicate tone without use of diacritic symbols.
Twenty-four in all, including the obsolete ts, which was used to represent the modern ch at some places. The additional necessities are the nasal symbol ⁿ (superscript n; the uppercase form N is sometimes used in all caps texts, such as book titles or section headings), and the tonal diacritic.
In 2006, the National Languages Communitee (Ministry of Education, Republic of China) proposed a scheme called "Tâi-ôan Lô-má-jī" (literally, "romanized orthography for Taiwanese"). This scheme reconciles the two of the more senior orthographies, TLPA and POJ. The changes for the consonants involved using "ts" for POJ's "ch" (reverting to the orthography in the 19th century), and "tsh" for "chh". For the vowels, "ou" could optionally represented as "oo". The nasal mark "ⁿ" could also be represented optionally as "nn". The rest of the scheme, most notably the use of diacritics to mark the tones, appeared to keep to the POJ tradition. One of the aims of this compromise was to curb any increase of "market share" for Tongyong Pinyin. It is unclear whether the community will adopt this new agreement.
There was an orthography of Taiwanese based on the Japanese kana during Japanese rule. The Kuomintang government also tried to introduce an orthography in bopomofo.
Taiwanese kana is a katakana-based writing system once used to write Holo Taiwanese, when Taiwan was ruled by Japan. It functioned as a phonetic guide to hanzi, much like furigana in Japanese or Zhuyin fuhao in Chinese. There were similar systems for other languages in Taiwan as well, including Hakka and Formosan languages.
The system was imposed by Japan at the time, and used in a few dictionaries, as well as textbooks. The Japanese-Taiwanese Dictionary published in 1931-1932, is an example. It uses various signs and diacritics to denote sounds that do not exist in Japanese. The system is chiefly based on the Amoy (Xiamen) dialect of Min Nan.
Through the system, the Office of the Governor-General of Taiwan aimed to help Taiwanese people learn the Japanese language, as well as help Japanese people learn the Taiwanese language. Linguistically speaking, however, the syllabary system was cumbersome for a language that has phonology far more complicated than Japanese. After Japanese administration ended, the system soon became obsolete. Now, only a few scholars, such as the ones who study aforementioned dictionary, learn Taiwanese kana.
Currently, Mojikyo is the only piece of software/encoding that fully supports the system. Unicode lacks small katakana wo and tone signs; although lacking precomposed overlined and underdotted kana[citation needed], combining character sequences containing the combining overline and combining dot below are sufficient for representing overlined and underdotted kana.
The system has undergone some modification over time. This article is mainly about the last edition, used from roughly 1931.