Omniglot - the blog

This is another guest post by Marcis Gasuns.

Namaskar,

It’s been a problem ever since the first font was created and never truly solved until this day. The typefaces used to print Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary or MacDonnell’s Grammars have not been beaten by the PC fonts - they are much weaker. The god of typography is in the small details. And without those nuances, fonts are worthless. Below is an example of Mangal Devanagari Unicode font, installed on every XP, Vista PC:

बहवो न विरोद्घव्या दुर्जयो हि महाजनः।

स्फुरन्तम् अपि नागेन्द्रं भक्षयन्ति पिपीलिकाः॥

No variants are available for vowels (in MSS there are variants for - two for “a”, three for “e” etc.); there are no udatta markers as in Boehtling’s dictionaries, which remain the best Sanskrit dictionaries to this day. Different fonts have different issues.

There is no perfect TrueType or OpenType font at the moment, no matters whether it’s free or commercial. So there are the Unicode Devanagari and non-Unicode Devanagari fonts, from which we have to choose - or one can scan old books and Xerox them. I choose to use imperfect fonts rather than to copy old books.

The Unicode Devanagari fonts don’t support several (Vedic) accent marks and they’re rather low on all kinds of typographic nuances (ligatures like “drsthva” are totally wrong). The best Unicode Devanagari font for Windows available today is Ulrich’s Sanskrit 2003. It does look like the more up-to-date Hindi fonts (which is no good, as we deal with Rigveda and other rarer ancient sacred texts), but it does have a few hundred ligatures. However, as with all the Unicode fonts, it can’t have variants of the same ligature, some of them have up to four known variants, as “la”, for example.

There is an alternative font, called Chandas, containing 4347 glyphs: 325 half-forms, 960 half-forms context-variations, 2743 ligature-signs (which should be enough, to print even Panini’s grammar), but the author, Mihail Bayaryn from Minsk, has abandoned the project and there are still some additional Devanagari marks from the MSS missing there. I have to admit that Ulrich’s font, on which he has worked more than year, looks better when printed, but contains fewer ligatures (so you can’t print Ashthadyayi with any of the Ulrich’s fonts).

So there remain the non-Unicode fonts (some of them even with Mac support). Ulrich is also the author of Sanskrit 99, which has a very interesting counterpart, entitled Ancient Sanskrit 98 with Bombay-Mumbay characters like instead of the more common Delhi-Varanasi styled fonts. From a typographical point of view (not web), the best looking fonts are the “French” (called Gudakesha, as found in Bopp, 1816) and “German” (Shantipur, as found in Harvard Oriental Series vol. 14, 1914) fonts that we have created together with Tikhomirov, which have been made public at Ulrich’s website without my allowance, breaking our copyrights (the legal copy can be downloaded here). For 5 years I’ve been looking for each of more than 500 more common ligatures in the Sanskrit books published in Paris, Bonn, Oxford, to find every sign.

In late 2005 the fonts were still not finished, in 2006 they were hinted by Mihail Bayaryn (a private OpenType version was made) and the fonts have never been finished. They are replicas of old book fonts. You can see the history of making of both the fonts at Nagari Sanskrit Group and the second Devanagari font as well, also a specimen.

To put it in a nutshell. If you need an easy-to-type font - Sanskrit 2003 is the one to choose (forget about Mangal installed on Windows XP by default, it’s for Hindi, not for Sanskrit), but if you want to have the Indian flavour - use the unfinished fonts by Marcis Gasuns & Tikhomirov hinted by Mihail Bayaryn, having some of the missing characters from Ancient Sanskrit 98. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Namaste,

Simon agreed that I’ll occasionally post reviews about Asia, India and devanagari, typography and some font & linguistic software related matters as well.

I’m a young man, born in Riga and spreading the Sanskrit message around the world. Working as a Sanskrit Reader in Russia, teaching at the Russian State University and writing a PhD about Sanskrit verbal roots. I’m planning to publish several Sanskrit manuals and reprints of old books in the near future. I’m an editor as well of the Sanskrit section of the Open Directory and http://nagari.southindia.ru. So you can download some dictionaries there, etc.

It is strange that 200 years after the first Nagari typefaces where cast in iron in India, we’ve got no fine Devanagari fonts at our disposal. Ok, we have quite a few Hindi fonts. But, hey, there are many differences. No Devanagari fonts at the moment supports the four variants of “la” or the northern (Varanasi) and southern (Mumbai) variant of the letter “a”. Ok, some may say that who cares about Nagari font, but you do know and notice the difference, if you’re a teacher - students get stuck seeing a letter they’ve never seen before and have no reference chart to look upon.

None of the True Type Unicode fonts have a precoded ligature for “sthva” (which means the “va” should be under the “sth” and not beside it) as it was in the good old times when Harvard Oriental Series was printed (even they have lost the type in the latest editions, e.g. the 50th edition was printed in transliteration only). All the letters in Windows fonts are written without even the slightest break, though it is well known that in the manuscripts and books printed before 1914 in Europe, Devanagari letters are separated buy 1-1.5 mm. Maybe it is not very good from the point of view of grammarians, but, sure, it looks much better. Devanagari font differences like these can be continued.
That’s it for today, next post will be in a while. Is there anybody who’s interested to hear about Unicode Devanagari font matters?

Typography is:
1. the art or process of printing from type;
2. the art or process of setting and arranging type for printing;
3. the arrangement, style, or general appearance of printed matter
(from yourdictionary).

It comes via French and Latin from the Greek τύπος (typos), to strike + γραφία (graphia), to write.

I chose this word today because I found an interesting blog about typhography called I Love Typography. As well as discussing typography, the author also gives advice on creating your own fonts, something that quite a few people ask me about. There are also some slightly less-than-serious posts, such as this one about Typoholism, “A disorder characterized by the excessive consumption of and dependence on type…”.

I think I ’suffer’ from typoholism, and a related condition for which I can’t think of a word at the moment. Can you think of a word for my love of languages and writing systems? Perhaps ‘panglotophilia’.

I received an email today about what is apparently the first Typographic Tour of Italy or Il Grand Tour della tipografia italiana. When I first saw the subject of the email I thought someone was organising a tour of Italy especially for typographers. Then I realised it’s actually a virtual tour via images and text on a website. There are also links to GoogleEarth, which enable you to see maps and images of the sites where the examples of type and lettering are found.

The site contains examples of inscriptions and signs from around Italy in a variety of styles and provides information about the people who designed the typefaces. Most of the information is in Italian, but there is also an explanation of the project in English.

Continuing yesterday’s theme of typography, here are a few more interesting typographic terms I came across today:

River of white
- a column of white space that occurs when word space in quite a few successive lines of type happen to end up below each other, as mentioned by P Terry Hunt in the comments on yesterday’s post.

Run around
- this when you fit the text around a picture or other design element.

Pagination
- this means either arranging the type and other elements so that they will be output in page format, or numbering the pages.

This is a term I heard frequently when I worked in the design department as a lone web developer surrounded by graphic designers. Since then the internet side of the company has expanded considerably.

Gutter
- the white space between columns on a page.

Widow
- either a single short line at the top of the page or column which is the end of a sentence or a paragraph, or a single word or syllable standing as the last line of a paragraph.

Source: http://www.typography-1st.com