Andika Font

Annie Olsen, 2008-05-05; 81917 reads

'I cannot wait to see what else you do with this font!'

Introduction to Andika

Andika is a sans serif, Unicode-compliant font designed especially for literacy use, taking into account the needs of beginning readers. The focus is on clear, easy-to-perceive letterforms that will not be readily confused with one another.

A sans serif font is preferred by some literacy personnel for teaching people to read. Its forms are simpler and less cluttered than those of most serif fonts. For years, literacy workers have had to make do with fonts that were not really suitable for beginning readers and writers. In some cases, literacy specialists have had to tediously assemble letters from a variety of fonts in order to get all of the characters they need for their particular language project, resulting in confusing and unattractive publications. Andika addresses those issues.

Andika Basic: Letter designs now set

After receiving many insightful comments on the Design Review fonts, we have refined Andika's final letterforms, with alternate shapes still available for some characters. Andika Basic Regular (bold, italic, and bold italic are yet to come) is here released as the foundation for the Andika font family.

Supported Characters

SIL's "Basic" Roman fonts — Andika Basic, Gentium Basic, and Gentium Book Basic — have a limited character set, supporting only the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement Unicode ranges, plus a selection of the more commonly used extended Latin characters, with miscellaneous diacritical marks, symbols and punctuation. See documentation page for a list of every character included in this current release.

TypeTuner support included!

With any Graphite-enabled application or the SIL TypeTuner Web utility, you can select which alternates to use as Andika's default letterforms. Here's how they compare: in the top row are default glyphs in the font as downloaded; in the bottom row are available alternates. Refer to the Andika Basic Type Sample for a complete display of every glyph in the current release.

"More than A-Z: In Search of a Global Latin Literacy Font"

SIL Presentation given at Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) annual conference, October 2009, Mexico City

"More than A - Z: In search of a global latin literacy font" slides
Annie Olsen, 2009-11-02
Download "MoreThanA-Z_slides.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 6MB [535 downloads]

"More than A - Z: In search of a global latin literacy font" notes
Annie Olsen, 2009-11-02
Download "MoreThanA-Z_notes.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 436KB [297 downloads]