[INDOLOGY] Sanskrit characters: a comparison of 12 fonts and their coverage of conjuncts

[Jan Kučera]

(Given the lists contained Arial Unicode MS and Mangal, I don’t think general availability of the fonts was an issue.)

For those interested on the usage restriction of fonts shipping with Windows, you might find https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/font-faq helpful. Notably, you are allowed to produce PDFs or even share original documents with fonts embedded in a way that respects the font embedding rights. Sanskrit Text is set to allow editable embedding (you can check that in the font file properties > Details > Font embeddability), so the receiving party can edit the document using this font. So while Dominik is correct that you should have a licensed copy of Windows to create documents using these fonts, I feel that “cannot be used” might be slightly misleading wording.

Either way, the same font designers produced Tiro Devanagari Sanskrit, which is open source and available at https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Tiro+Devanagari+Sanskrit/. The project also includes fonts for Bangla, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu: https://github.com/TiroTypeworks/Indigo.

Best regards,
Jan Kučera
ल Institute of South and Central Asia Students, Prague


From: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2023 10:40 PM
To: Jan Kučera <jan.kucera at ujca.cz>
Cc: indology at list.indology.info
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] Sanskrit characters: a comparison of 12 fonts and their coverage of conjuncts

" the redistribution of fonts supplied with Windows is generally not allowed".

None of these fonts is generally available; Sanskrit Text etc. cannot be shared or used except if you are using a licensed copy of Windows 10 or 11.

Best,
Dominik
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