High-quality Devanāgarī fonts suitable for professional typesetting are still hard to come by. One foundry producing fonts to something like the required standard is Pune-based Modular Infotech. They offer true bold faces and true italics. Refer to their specimen (published 2004, but apparently still current):
Modular Infotech Typefaces Catalog (2004:2)
Since I haven’t used any of Modular Infotech’s fonts at the time of writing – they don’t come cheap – this is not yet a recommendation. Meanwhile, it’s possible to do some limited testing at fonts.com by clicking ‘TRY IT’ and typing a Unicode Devanāgarī string.
The Brill is a Unicode font containing most of the characters used to typeset Sanskrit in roman script. It’s based on Baskerville, which has been used widely in typesetting Brill’s books. From the official pamphlet:
The Brill.
It’s plain to see that it blows fonts like Gentium out of the water, though that certainly isn’t saying much. I don’t love The Brill; some of its features evoke Bulmer’s inelegant take on Baskerville, and it lacks breathing space (which was a design requirement, “allowing Brill to reduce its environmental footprint” – like that’s going to happen). Which is just as as well, because The Brill can only be used for non-commercial purposes – i.e., nowhere in a published PDF or in the browsed or printed page without prior written permission. If you agree, download it here.
A new and ambitious font, Source Sans Pro, which has glyphs in the Latin Extended Additional codeblock (required for most Indological publishing in Unicode), was released by Adobe earlier this month.
Why ambitious? Because free, open source, high quality and produced by a stalwart of design in the digital era, all at once. Its letterforms riff on News Gothic, a typeface of enduring appeal. And it comes with an inspiringly comprehensive set of weights, from Extra Light to Black, and true italics. Anyone who knows what a proper font needs to have will know how rare and remarkable this is. Although it’s optimised for user interfaces, I’ve tested it in XeTeX and found that it works superbly. Here’s a snippet of how it looks, from the specimen:
Source Sans Pro Capitals, regular weight (specimen, p.9).
What’s the catch? None other than the fact that just by using it and pulling apart the source, you might be more inclined to contribute to its development. A reason for releasing the font as open source (and hence free) is to demystify the increasingly complicated process of creating multiple-weight Unicode OpenType fonts, thereby encouraging the production and proliferation of fonts that meet contemporary standards. Open source lets all that complexity communally come to light, as Paul D. Hunt (and his commenters) reveal in Adobe’s official announcement of the font.
Outrageously expensive scans of basic material for the study of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism:
DPS電子仏教文献データ 『ギャンツェ・テンパンマ・カンギュル写本DVD』 470,000円
DPS電子仏教文献データ 『北京版カンギュルDVD』 370,000円 [prices from Kawachen]
Digital Preservation Society. Tempangma manuscript of the Kangyur. 113 (? out of 114) volumes. PDF files, distributed on DVD. Shinagawa, Tokyo: 2010. US$4,700.00 (Including shipping) [sample]
Digital Preservation Society. Peking Kangyur. 107 volumes. PDF files, distributed on DVD. Shinagawa, Tokyo: 2010. US$3,700.00 (Including shipping) [sample]
Udanavarga MS, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fol.1
With Japan and Europe now putting significant parts their manuscript holdings online — with only beneficial consequences, it seems — let us hope that our friends in China rapidly follow suit.
Georg Duffner’s EB Garamond, according to its official website, “is an open source project to create a revival of Claude Garamont’s famous humanist typeface from the mid-16th century.”
It has true italics, true bold (more like semi-bold), true subscripts and superscripts, true swash caps and true small caps (including true capital ß – see Ralf Herrmann’s crystal-clear presentation on this). There are old style figures, discretionary ligatures, and work-in-progress initials. And in particular, there is coverage of the Unicode Latin Extended Additional codeblock.
This is not only actually all in a free font, but in one that looks pretty good, as the specimen [PDF] shows:
EB Garamond specimen: just... wow.
Although I haven’t given EB Garamond a full tryout yet, I can confirm that it works out of the box in XeTeX, which is probably the tool that can exploit its advantages to the fullest.
A caveat: EB Garamond is work in progress; Cyrillic italics, for example, are clearly provisional at the time of writing, and some outlines were updated as recently as a couple of weeks ago on github. Nonetheless, it will be good enough to set camera-ready copy for many projects as it stands; it is certainly miles ahead of the unspeakable G****** U****** and its ilk. Thankyou, Mr. Duffner.
