[INDOLOGY] Clarification: Early 20th century Indian publishers and fonts

[Harry Spier]

Thank you Madhav and Andrew,
>From the Adishila font webpage given by Andrew Ollett
https://adishila.com/fonts/
*Adishila Samskrta:*  The font design is exact trace of Nirnay Sagar Press
books without modification.
*Adishila:* The font design is inspired by Vanivilas Press Srirangam.
* Adishila Dev*:  The font design is inspired by Nirnay Sagar Press books.as
footnote fonts or title fonts.

So the fonts exist to simulate the typefaces of  some of the major
devanagari publishers of the early 20th century .  Do we know when the
Nirnaya Sagar Press started producing its typeface. Was it sometime in the
19th century or is that too early?

Thanks,
Harry Spier




On Sun, May 11, 2025 at 9:25 AM Andrew Ollett <andrew.ollett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> This has come up before on this list, but:
>
> https://adishila.com/fonts/
>
> On Sun, May 11, 2025, 3:20 PM Madhav Deshpande via INDOLOGY <
> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>
>> The Nirnaya Sagar Press had its own type foundry. They were preceded in
>> this task by another press in Mumbai run by Ganpat Krishnaji. The Bombay
>> government under the British started publishing Devanagari tracts perhaps
>> using fonts made by some Bengal outfit.
>> While designing my Madhushree [pre-Unicode] font, I had tried to copy the
>> Nirnaya Sagar font. Now perhaps Sanskrit2003 font comes close to Nirnaya
>> Sagar.
>>
>> Madhav M. Deshpande
>> Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics
>> University of Michigan, Ann  Arbor, Michigan, USA
>> Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
>> Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore,
>> India
>>
>> [Residence: Campbell, California, USA]
>>
>>
>> On Sat, May 10, 2025 at 5:32 PM Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <
>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I meant to write:
>>>
>>> Dear list members,
>>>
>>> Would anyone know:
>>> 1) Did the larger early 20th century Indian publishers such as Vidya
>>> Vlas Press, Nirnaya-sagar press, and others use the same typeface to
>>> typeset their publications, or did each publisher have its own unique
>>> typeface.
>>>
>>> 2) Has anyone made a modern unicode font to mirror the typeface used by
>>> Nirnaya-sagar press.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Harry Spier
>>>
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>>
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