Devanagari, also called Nagari, is a left-to-right abugida, based on the ancient Brāhmī script, used in the Indian subcontinent. It was developed in ancient India from the 1st to the 4th century CE and was in regular use by the 7th century CE. The Devanagari script, composed of 47 primary characters including 14 vowels and 33 consonants, is the fourth most widely adopted writing system in the world, being used for over 120 languages.
Sinhala script, also known as Sinhalese script, is a writing system used by the Sinhalese people and most Sri Lankans in Sri Lanka and elsewhere to write the Sinhala language, as well as the liturgical languages, Pali and Sanskrit. The Sinhalese Akṣara Mālāva, one of the Brahmic scripts, is a descendant of the Ancient Indian Brahmi script. It is also related to Grantha script.
Malayalam script is a Brahmic script used commonly to write Malayalam, which is the principal language of Kerala, India, spoken by 45 million people in the world. It is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India Malayalam script is also widely used for writing Sanskrit texts in Kerala.
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
Devanagari is an Indian script used for many languages of India and Nepal, including Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and Sanskrit. There are several somewhat similar methods of transliteration from Devanagari to the Roman script, including the influential and lossless IAST notation.
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters æ and œ used in English and French, in which the letters 'a' and 'e' are joined for the first ligature and the letters 'o' and 'e' are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, 'f' and 'i' are often merged to create 'fi' ; the same is true of 's' and 't' to create 'st'. The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters 'E' and 't' were combined.
The National Library at Kolkata romanisation is a widely used transliteration scheme in dictionaries and grammars of Indic languages. This transliteration scheme is also known as (American) Library of Congress and is nearly identical to one of the possible ISO 15919 variants. The scheme is an extension of the IAST scheme that is used for transliteration of Sanskrit.
In digital typography, the TrueType font Arial Unicode MS is an extended version of the font Arial. Compared to Arial, it includes higher line height, omits kerning pairs and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of Unicode 2.1—thus supporting most Microsoft code pages, but also requiring much more storage space. It also adds Ideographic layout tables, but unlike Arial, it mandates no smoothing in the 14–18 point range, and contains Roman (upright) glyphs only; there is no oblique (italic) version. Arial Unicode MS was previously distributed with Microsoft Office, but this ended in 2016 version. It is bundled with Mac OS X v10.5 and later. It may also be purchased separately from Ascender Corporation, who licenses the font from Microsoft.
Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII) is a coding scheme for representing various writing systems of India. It encodes the main Indic scripts and a Roman transliteration. The supported scripts are: Bengali–Assamese, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. ISCII does not encode the writing systems of India that are based on Persian, but its writing system switching codes nonetheless provide for Kashmiri, Sindhi, Urdu, Persian, Pashto and Arabic. The Persian-based writing systems were subsequently encoded in the PASCII encoding.
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during the nineteenth century from suggestions by Charles Trevelyan, William Jones, Monier Monier-Williams and other scholars, and formalised by the Transliteration Committee of the Geneva Oriental Congress, in September 1894. IAST makes it possible for the reader to read the Indic text unambiguously, exactly as if it were in the original Indic script. It is this faithfulness to the original scripts that accounts for its continuing popularity amongst scholars.
There are Unicode typefaces which are open-source and designed to contain glyphs of all Unicode characters, or at least a broad selection of Unicode scripts. There are also numerous projects aimed at providing only a certain script, such as the Arabeyes Arabic font. The advantage of targeting only some scripts with a font was that certain Unicode characters should be rendered differently depending on which language they are used in, and that a font that only includes the characters a certain user needs will be much smaller in file size compared to one with many glyphs. Unicode fonts in modern formats such as OpenType can in theory cover multiple languages by including multiple glyphs per character, though very few actually cover more than one language's forms of the unified Han characters.
Virama is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either
- halanta or explicit virāma, a diacritic in many Brahmic scripts, including the Devanagari and Eastern Nagari scripts, or
- saṃyuktākṣara or implicit virama, a conjunct consonant or ligature.
GNU FreeFont is a family of free OpenType, TrueType and WOFF vector fonts, implementing as much of the Universal Character Set (UCS) as possible, aside from the very large CJK Asian character set. The project was initiated in 2002 by Primož Peterlin and is now maintained by Steve White.
GNU Unifont is a free Unicode bitmap font using an intermediate bitmapped font format created by Roman Czyborra. The main Unifont covers all of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). The "upper" companion covers significant parts of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP). The "Unifont JP" companion contains Japanese kanji present in the JIS X 0213 character set.
Clip fonts or split fonts are non-Unicode fonts that assign glyphs of Brahmic scripts, such as Devanagari, at code positions intended for glyphs of the Latin script or to produce glyphs not found in Unicode by using its Private Use Area (PUA).
Kha is the second consonant of Indic abugidas. In modern Indic scripts, kha is derived from the Brahmi letter , which is probably derived from the Aramaic ("Q").
Ga is the third consonant of Indic abugidas. In modern Indic scripts, ga is derived from the early "Ashoka" Brahmi letter , which is probably derived from the Aramaic letter after having gone through the Gupta letter .
Ja is the eighth consonant of Indic abugidas. In modern Indic scripts, ja is derived from the early "Ashoka" Brahmi letter after having gone through the Gupta letter .
Jha is the ninth consonant of Indic abugidas. In modern Indic scripts, jha is derived from the early "Ashoka" Brahmi letter after having gone through the Gupta letter .
