It was largely based on Jan Hus's Czech alphabet and was meant to serve as a unified orthography for three Croat-populated kingdoms within the Austrian Empire at the time, namely Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia, and their three dialect groups, Kajkavian, Chakavian and Shtokavian, which historically utilized different spelling rules.

A slightly modified version of it was later adopted as the formal Latin writing system for the unified Serbo-Croatian standard language per the Vienna Literary Agreement.

It served as one of the official scripts in the unified South Slavic state of Yugoslavia alongside Vuk's Cyrillic alphabet.

When clarity is needed, they are pronounced similar to the German alphabet: a, be, ce, če, će, de, dže, đe, e, ef, ge, ha, i, je, ka, el, elj, em, en, enj, o, pe, er, es, eš, te, u, ve, ze, že.

Digraphs ⟨dž⟩, ⟨lj⟩ and ⟨nj⟩ are considered to be single letters: The Serbo-Croatian Latin alphabet was mostly designed by Ljudevit Gaj, who modelled it after Czech (č, ž, š) and Polish (ć), and invented ⟨lj⟩, ⟨nj⟩ and ⟨dž⟩, according to similar solutions in Hungarian (ly, ny and dzs, although dž combinations exist also in Czech and Polish).

Gaj followed the example of Pavao Ritter Vitezović and the Czech orthography, making one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language.

[3] Đuro Daničić suggested in his Rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika ("Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian language") published in 1880 that Gaj's digraphs ⟨dž⟩, ⟨dj⟩, ⟨lj⟩ and ⟨nj⟩ should be replaced by single letters : ⟨ģ⟩, ⟨đ⟩, ⟨ļ⟩ and ⟨ń⟩ respectively.

: In the 1990s, there was a general confusion about the proper character encoding to use to write text in Latin Croatian on computers.

The breakthrough came in 1845, when the Slovene conservative leader Janez Bleiweis started using Gaj's script in his journal Kmetijske in rokodelske novice ("Agricultural and Artisan News"), which was read by a wide public in the countryside.