Soon after the first World War the missionaries decided to discontinue printing books in the Batak script.

Unlike most Brahmi-based scripts, Batak does not form consonant conjuncts.

They can change the vowel from the inherent /a/, mark a final [velar nasal] /ŋ/, mark a final velar fricative /x/, or indicate a final consonant with no vowel: The diacritic for U used by Mandailing, Pakpak, Simalungun, and Toba can form ligatures with its base character: In Mandailing, the diacritic tompi can be used to change the sound of some characters: The diacritics for Ng () and H () are usually written above spacing vowel diacritics instead of above the base character.

Consonants with no vowel are marked by the Batak pangolat or panongonan diacritic, depending on the language.

Examples of closed syllables using pangolat: Batak is normally written without spaces or punctuation (as scriptio continua).

Batak script was added to the Unicode Standard in October 2010 with the release of version 6.0.