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The Shobhika Font The Shobhika font The Cell for Indian Science and Technology design for the seemingly countless number of in Sanskrit (CISTS) at IIT Bombay investigates conjunct characters that arise by the combination the scientific literature extant in the Sanskrit of two, three, four, or even five consonants. Most language, and publishes the findings in a way Devanagari fonts however ship with only a couple that is palatable to a modern reader. In pursuit of of hundred glyphs to cater to the most commonly our work at CISTS, we have long felt hampered by occurring conjunct characters. When the end the limited tools available for the typesetting and user attempts to type any character which is not publishing documents in the Devanagari script, included, the font compensates by breaking the as the work was carried out using a sub-optimal conjunct character, which is not desirable. To combination of proprietary and/or open source address this issue, we identified well over 1100 tools lacking full Unicode compatibility for a lack conjunct characters in various Sanskrit texts. The of better options. The documents thus prepared unique characters from this list were added to could not be easily shared among scholars, nor the base Yashomudra font. In addition, the font readily searched. also inherits from Yashomudra certain conjunct characters found in languages like Marathi As we decided to move to the free, open source, and Urdu, or those required for transliteration and fully Unicode compliant XeTeX typesetting of English words into Devanagari. We further system to circumvent this problem, it was designed the ‘ि ’ and ‘ ी’ matras in multiple widths realised that the available Devanagari fonts had to ensure that they sit properly on conjunct deficiencies that included any or all among: characters of various widths, and also combine ■■ Poor support for conjunct characters appropriately with marks like repha, chandrabindu, etc. Numerous other improvements, too long to list ■■ Unaesthetic rendering of Vedic accents here, have been made to ensure a quality and bug- ■■ Lack of cross platform compatibility free experience. ■■ Availability in only a single weight, and 2. Support for a wide range of Vedic accents ■■ Missing or poor quality companion Latin font. Correct pronunciation and proper intonation are extremely critical in the study of the vedas. In addition, font hinting, kerning, and other Therefore, Vedic Sanskrit - unlike classical typographic flourishes were almost entirely Sanskrit - makes use of a variety of accent marks missing from many Devanagari fonts. (svara) in combination with characters to denote To address these issues, CISTS took the lead to the proper intonation required at each place. develop a new font, in collaboration with designers The implementation of Vedic accents in fonts is at the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay. complicated because the svaras compete for the To make this mammoth undertaking more limited space available above and below a given manageable, we decided to base our work on two character with a variety of other matras, or marks existing fonts: (i) Yashomudra (for Devanagari) by like the repha or vattu. Shobhika addresses many Rajya Marathi Vikas Sanstha, and (ii) PT Serif (for of these challenges, and supports a wide variety of Latin) by ParaType. The Shobhika font is built Vedic accents and nasalisation marks. upon these two fonts. 3. Cross-platform compatibility The main features of Shobhika: Historically, different operating systems like Windows, macOS and Linux have used their own 1. Outstanding support for Devanagari schemes for the input and display of text on the conjuncts computer. However, recently, all major operating While the Western typographer has to typically systems have moved to a single scheme following design only a base set of characters in lower and the establishment of the Unicode standard. upper case, the Devanagari type designer has to Shobhika supports almost all Devanagari 284 | Glimpses of Research | Vol. II of II characters defined by Unicode, except for a few component on a number of design parameters, accents and cantillation marks required for resulting in a harmonious appearance on the page. Samaveda. The font has been developed using We have extended the Latin component with a the modern OpenType format, and works across variety of mathematical symbols and diacritic Windows, macOS, and Linux in all Unicode characters to cater to a wider range of scholarly compliant applications such as MS Office, Libre requirements, and to offer better support for Office, and XeTeX. Installing Shobhika on any Roman transliteration of Devanagari. ParaType computer is as simple as downloading and double shipped PT Serif with in-built support for the clicking the font. Cyrillic script, and Shobhika too retains this functionality. 4. Availability in two weights Many Sanskrit works are typically typeset in Reception and Recognition: two weights, either to distinguish the original The font has been received enthusiastically by work and a commentary on the same page, or to a wide spectrum of academics. In particular, differentiate specific words and their meanings we have received appreciations both from the while explaining the import of the original text students and scholars of Sanskrit across the globe. in the commentary. Keeping this requirement in As a representative sample, we quote below mind, Shobhika has been designed in two weights the message received (by e-mail) from a world (regular as well as a bold). renowned scholar in the area of Sanskrit grammar 5. Good quality companion Latin font and linguistics, Emeritus Prof. George Cardona, U. As English is the lingua franca of academic Penn, “This is truly an excellent font, which I have research, scholars across the world have to prepare now adopted as the single font I will use in my multi-lingual documents. The Latin component work on Panini and other Sanskrit works.” of Shobhika is based on the PT Serif typeface For downloading and other details: designed by ParaType, which was specifically https://github.com/Sandhi-IITBombay/Shobhika chosen for its compatibility with the Devanagari Prof. K. Ramasubramanian, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, [email protected] Prof. Girish Dalvi, Industrial Design Centre, [email protected] Vol. II of II | Glimpses of Research | 285.
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