Alibata writing system is an abugida system which is a segmental writing system that uses consonant-vowel combinations. Each letter represents a consonant accompanied by a specific vowel. Each character, written in its basic form, is a consonant ending with a vowel “A”. For producing consonants that ends with the other vowel sound, a mark is placed either above the consonant (to produce an “E” or “I” sound) or below the consonant (to produce an “O” or “U” sound). The mark is called a kudlit. Kudlit does not apply to stand-alone vowels. Vowels have their own glyphs. Glyphs are symbolic figure that is usually engraved or incised. For D or R there is only one symbol as they were allophones in most languages of the Philippines, wherein D fell in initial, final, pre-consonantal or post-consonantal positions and R in intervocalic positions.

Alibata is a stand-alone consonant (consonants not ending with any vowel sound), in its original form cannot be produced, in which case these were simply not written and the reader would fill in the missing consonants through context. The Spanish priests who were the ones translating books into the native language find this method particularly hard. Father Francisco Lopez introduced his own kudlit in 1960 that eliminated the vowel sound because of that incident. The kudlit was in the form of a “+” sign, in reference to Christianity. The cross-shaped kudlit operated precisely the same as the virama in the Devanagari script of India. In fact, Unicode calls this kudlit the Tagalog Sign Virama.