This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ranjana Letters gathers the forty seven signs of an ornamental Brahmi derived script of the Kathmandu Valley, in use from about the eleventh century onward to write Sanskrit and Nepal Bhasa, chiefly for Mahayana Buddhist manuscripts.
Ranjana inherits the Indian vowel and consonant order unchanged, the short and long pairs of A, I and U, the four compound vowels built from them, and the full run of consonants organised by place of articulation, so a scribe trained on Devanagari or Siddham already knows the sequence a Ranjana chart follows. What differs is the letterform rather than the system: Ranjana's dependent vowel signs are unusually elaborate, which is part of why the script was favoured for manuscript titles, inscriptions and other display work over a plainer everyday hand.
Because the script has no Unicode allocation, every letter in the atlas is stored as a vector outline drawn from an openly licensed Ranjana typeface rather than as encoded text. The script carries the whole Sanskritic apparatus even where the sounds are barely used, vocalic L and vocalic LL among them, letters confined to a handful of forms of a single verbal root, the long form the least attested letter of the whole series; they are kept because the script was made to set the complete varnamala, and its principal surviving use, the Newar Buddhist Prajnaparamita manuscripts, called for exactly that completeness.