[INDOLOGY] South Asian typography

[Tyler Williams]

Dear colleagues interested in South Asian typography,

In case you have not already seen it: Scroll.in ran a story a few days ago
that provides a succinct overview of the current scene in commercial South
Asian typography
<https://scroll.in/magazine/919214/even-in-the-world-of-fonts-few-people-cared-for-indian-languages-until-now>.
You will find a few familiar names here from the Indological community as
well as several new ones who are doing good work.

In particular, it provides an introduction to the work of the Indian Type
Foundry <https://www.indiantypefoundry.com/> and EkType
<https://ektype.in/font-family.html>, both of which have developed
beautiful Unicode fonts *in* multiple South Asian scripts, and *for *multiple
South Asian scripts. That is to say that they are grappling with the
challenge of developing fonts that appear uniform across multiple South
Asian scripts, and across South Asian scripts and the Latin script. (Anyone
who has tried to typeset a document in both Latin and a South Asian script
knows how time-consuming this can be when fonts do not match up in terms of
weight, kern, tracking, etc.)

Though many of their fonts are proprietary, each has several fonts that are
open source. I have recently begun experimenting with the Jaini
<https://github.com/EkType/Jaini> calligraphic font developed by EkType,
which is (loosely) based on the script used in a 1503 copy of the
*Kalpasūtra*. (I say loosely because they have modified some glyphs so that
they will be more easily recognized by contemporary readers unfamiliar with
earlier orthography.) Several other gems can be found on the Indian Type
Foundry and EkType websites.

Regards,
Tyler Williams
University of Chicago


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