Incredible Journey !

1980sTheUnicodeera

1800sPrintingera

o The earliest Type-foundry was Nirnay Sagar Press in the year 1834 which used to publish Sanskrit texts and had produced several high-quality Devanagari typefaces.

1900sBeforeUnicode

o MS-DOS environments or the operative systems that preceded Mac OSX had standard formats (Postscript or TrueType) which have a set limit of just 256 characters. Thislimitedtypeface designinmostlanguages.

o Indic fonts were primarily designed by software developers who sold them as supporting products. The platform they used could not support more than 256 characters and so they had to fit all conjuncts within theglyph set.

o Fontslike AkrutiTypeface orShreeLipiTypeface (True type format) have existed for quite some time, but there is a distinctly visible difference in the character, weight, look, and feel of the typefaces and the current high-quality multilingual typography made by designers.

o 1981- The Xerox Star workstation (1981) used a multi-byte encoding that allowed it to support a single character set with potentially millions of characters. Using this, they implemented a word-processing system that supported several scripts, including Roman, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese kana syllabaries. This work at Xerox was a direct inspirationfor Unicode.

o 1988- The Unicode Consortium(1991) with its objective to enable the exchange of multilingual documents among users made the Unicode Standard which is an information technology standard for the consistent representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The Unicode project was started in 1988 by Joe Becker (Xerox) and Lee Collins (Apple). The UnicodeStandardVersion1.0was publishedin October1991.

o 1997- OpenType format a new standard for digital fonts was developed by Microsoft and Adobe. OpenType had advantages as-

– Larger glyph limit(64k)

– Cross-platformsupport(WindowsandMac)

– Supportfor bothPostScriptType1 andTrueTypeoutlines

– Supportfor advancedtypographicfeatures o 1999- Unicode version 3.0.0 allocated Indian languages in chapter 9 (South and Southeast Asian scripts) covering almost 15 different scriptsincludingnineIndianones. o 2001- Mangal for Hindi and Latha for Tamil are the first known modern Indian fonts that supported two scripts were designed by RK Joshi, (Type designer, calligrapher, and professor at IIT Bombay). They were released in 2001 by Microsoft to support the Windows 2000 operating system. o 2009-FedraHindithe Devanagari fontwas released by IndianTypeFoundry.

– Immediatelyafter thatcustomfontswere developedbythe TiroTypeworksfor VodafoneHindi.

–“Itwas Fedra Hindithatopenedupthe marketin 2009,”saidShivaNallaperumal.

–“Suddenly every font was looking better. The technological advancement in design during this periodalsoplayed a role.”HiteshMalviya, (Independenttype designer,Baroda) o 2013- Mukta by Ek Type was launched as first open-source font family that supported Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi,Bengali,Tamil,andLatin. o 2018- Akhand Multiscript supports India's all 11 official writing scripts. Made by the Indian Type Foundry it supports Bengali, Devanagari, Latin, Malayalam, Tamil, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Odia, Telugu, and Arabic. It is made both for the Indian scripts, as well as several others like Sinhala(SriLanka). o Some Important Fonts with extended language support : Helvetica World, SST fonts, Restora, Okta Neue, Fedra Sans, Fedra Serif, Greta Sans, Greta Text,Lava,November,October, Ping,Skolar,WeafMono, Abraham,Ustina, Norsanda, Grotte,Omnes, Suisse,Dominicale o SomeImportantIndianFontswithextendedlanguagesupport areAkhand and Kohinoor (Indian type Foundry) Mukta, Sama,Baloo, andAnek(Ektype).

– Several independent Indian designers and studios were being commissioned around this time to create open-source fonts to populate the Google Fonts library, an initiative to create a resource ofbasefonts.Theresultwas thedevelopmentofmorepopularIndic-typefamilies.

–“It being open-source ensured everyone could use it free, including students, which made it one ofthemostpopularinthe country,”saidGirishDalvi.

– Akhand Multiscript supports India's all 11 official writing scripts.