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SIL Fonts for downloading

NRSI Staff, 2009-09-22; 114957 reads

    Released fonts
        IPA
        Unicode encoded fonts
            Abyssinica SIL
            Andika
            Apparatus SIL
            Arabic Script Unicode Fonts
            Charis SIL
            Dai Banna SIL
            Doulos SIL
            Ezra SIL Hebrew Unicode Font
            Galatia SIL
            Gentium
            Nuosu SIL (formerly SIL Yi)
            Padauk
            SIL IPA Unicode (beta)
            Sophia Nubian
            Special Interest Derivative Unicode Fonts
            Tai Heritage Pro
            Unicode BMP Fallback
        Legacy fonts
            Encode Numbers
            Nastaliq Navees
            SIL Apparatus
            SIL Encore Fonts
            SIL Greek Font System
            SIL Hebrew Font System
            SIL IPA
            SIL IPA93
            SIL Tai Dam
            SIL Dai Banna
            SIL Vai
            Zaghawa Beria Font
            Namdhinggo SIL L
    Fonts in Development
    Page History

Released fonts

IPA

IPA Transcription with SIL Fonts SIL Linguistics Department and NRSI staff, 2007-05-30; 846560 reads

SIL International has produced several font sets over the years that allow for the transcription of linguistic data using the International Phonetic Alphabet. This page should help the user to decide whether to use Unicode fonts or whether to use the SIL IPA or SIL IPA93 fonts. It provides links to many relevant resources with regard to the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Unicode encoded fonts

Abyssinica SIL

Abyssinica SIL Font Home Lorna A. Priest, 2006-05-25; 46553 reads

Home page for the Abyssinica SIL font. Abyssinica SIL supports all Ethiopic characters which are in Unicode including the Unicode 4.1 extensions. Some languages of Ethiopia are not yet able to be fully represented in Unicode and, where necessary, we have included non-Unicode characters in the Private Use Area.

Andika

Andika Font Annie Olsen, 2008-05-05; 73209 reads

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.

Apparatus SIL

Apparatus SIL NRSI team, 2009-06-12; 14153 reads

The Apparatus SIL fonts are the Unicode version of their predecessor, SIL Apparatus. The design is the same, only the encoding is different. The Apparatus SIL fonts were designed to provide most of the symbols needed to reproduce the textual apparatus found in major editions of Greek & Hebrew biblical texts. This font is now released under SIL's Open Font License.

Arabic Script Unicode Fonts

Arabic Script Unicode Fonts Bob Hallissy, Jonathan Kew, 2007-06-22; 246800 reads

Scheherazade and Lateef are extended Arabic script fonts designed by SIL International for modern Unicode-based systems using either OpenType or AAT (Apple Advanced Typography) for complex-script rendering.

Charis SIL

Charis SIL Font Home NRSI staff, 2009-04-24; 288116 reads

2009-04-24: Version 4.106 now available!!! This version supports Unicode 5.1 and adds support for Small capitals.

Charis SIL is a Unicode-encoded serif font. Besides having a comprehensive inventory of glyphs needed for almost any Roman- or Cyrillic-based writing system, it also contains the entire inventory of the International Phonetic Alphabet. It has built-in “smart-font” capabilities, so diacritics are properly placed.

Charis is similar to Bitstream Charter, one of the first fonts designed specifically for laser printers. It is highly readable and holds up well in less-than-ideal reproduction environments. It also has a full set of styles - regular, italic, bold, bold italic - and so is more useful in general publishing than Doulos SIL. Charis is a serif, proportionally-spaced font optimized for readability in long printed documents.

Dai Banna SIL

Dai Banna SIL Fonts Adrian Cheuk, 2008-06-06; 10385 reads

The Dai Banna SIL Fonts are the Unicode version of their predecessor, SIL Dai Banna Fonts. Apart from a few additional characters such as Chinese punctuation marks, the design is the same and represents a new rendering of the New Tai Lue (Xishuangbanna Dai) script, which was first added to Unicode 4.1. These fonts include a complete set of New Tai Lue consonants, vowels, tones and digits, along with punctuation and other useful symbols. A basic set of Latin glyphs, including Arabic numerals, is also provided. Chinese punctuation used in New Tai Lue texts are included as well. Two font families, differing only in weight, allow for a wide range of uses.

Doulos SIL

Doulos SIL Font Home NRSI staff, 2009-04-24; 575049 reads

2009-04-24: New Version 4.106 available!!! This version supports Unicode 5.1 and adds support for Small capitals.

Doulos SIL is a Unicode-encoded serif font similar to Times New Roman. Besides having a comprehensive inventory of glyphs needed for almost any Roman- or Cyrillic-based writing system, it also contains the entire inventory of the International Phonetic Alphabet. It has built-in “smart-font” capabilities, so diacritics are properly placed.

Doulos is very similar to Times/Times New Roman, but only has a single face - regular. It is intended for use alongside other Times-like fonts where a range of styles (italic, bold) are not needed.

Ezra SIL Hebrew Unicode Font

Ezra SIL Hebrew Unicode Font NRSI staff, 2009-02-16; 282147 reads

Home page for the Ezra SIL Unicode fonts.

Galatia SIL

Galatia SIL NRSI team, 2009-07-13; 138698 reads

For displaying and printing Biblical Greek texts in the Unicode encoding. This font is now released under SIL's Open Font License.

Gentium

Gentium is a typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin script to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode.

Nuosu SIL (formerly SIL Yi)

Nuosu SIL NRSI staff, 2009-07-09; 37103 reads

The Nuosu SIL Font is a single Unicode font for the standardized Yi script used by a large ethnic group in southwestern China. The font includes a complete set of Yi syllables and radicals (as defined in The Unicode Standard), a basic set of Roman glyphs and various punctuation.

Padauk

Padauk Font Martin Hosken, 2009-06-09; 45947 reads

Padauk is a smart font capable of rendering Burmese and the Myanmar script.

SIL IPA Unicode (beta)

The SIL Unicode IPA beta font was a Unicode-encoded font for Linux®, Macintosh® or Windows® systems. The Doulos SIL font has a more extensive character inventory, and replaces the IPA Unicode font beta font.

Sophia Nubian

Sophia Nubian Font 2009-09-25; 6951 reads

Sophia Nubian is a sans serif, Unicode-compliant font based on the SIL Sophia (similar to Univers) typeface. Its primary purpose is to provide adequate representation for Nubian languages which use the Coptic Unicode character set. Since Nubian languages do not use casing, uppercase characters are not included in this font. A basic set of Latin glyphs is also provided.

A keyboard is also provided. There are also TECkit mapping files to convert data in three legacy Nubian fonts to Unicode.

Special Interest Derivative Unicode Fonts

Special Interest Derivative Unicode Fonts Lorna A. Priest; 5389 reads

These fonts are based on SIL Fonts (currently only Charis SIL and Doulos SIL). They have been modified for use in a specific region (using TypeTuner) with default glyphs which are used in that part of the world.

Tai Heritage Pro

Tai Heritage Pro Jim Brase, 2009-09-22; 4218 reads

The Tai Heritage typeface is designed to reflect the traditional hand-written style of the Tai Viet script. Under the name Tai Heritage Pro, it is now available as a Unicode-encoded font (based on the upcoming Unicode 5.2 Standard) with Graphite rendering.

Unicode BMP Fallback

Unicode BMP Fallback Font Bob Hallissy, 2008-03-20; 19680 reads

Intended for debugging, this font contains a glyph for every character in the Basic Multilingual plane (including Private Use Area) of Unicode 5.1, each glyph consisting of a box enclosing the four hex digits identifying the Unicode scalar value.

Legacy fonts

Encode Numbers

Intended for debugging, the glyphs in these legacy fonts show the decimal character code for each character from 33 to 255.

Nastaliq Navees

The Nastaliq Navees ("Nastaliq Writer") font package provides the capability to render Arabic, Urdu, and related languages in the Nastaliq style of calligraphy. Shareware, $75 USD.

SIL Apparatus

The SIL Apparatus Fonts were designed to provide most of the symbols needed to reproduce the textual apparatus found in major editions of Greek & Hebrew biblical texts.

SIL Encore Fonts

A library of over 1600 phonetic characters and linguistic symbols that can be used to create customized, scalable fonts. This package was formerly available as a purchased package. It is now downloadable without cost.

SIL Greek Font System

The SIL Greek Font System is designed to be an integrated system for entering, displaying and printing Biblical Greek texts.

SIL Hebrew Font System

The SIL Hebrew Font System is a font package for displaying and printing Biblical Hebrew text.

SIL IPA

The SIL IPA Fonts are scalable outline fonts for both Macintosh and Windows systems.

SIL IPA93

The SIL IPA93 Fonts 2.0 include the 1993 revisions.

SIL Tai Dam

The SIL Tai Dam Fonts are regular and bold versions of the traditional Tai Dam script and are closely based on handwritten letters.

SIL Dai Banna

SIL Dai Banna Fonts NRSI staff, 2004-04-22; 28432 reads

The SIL Dai Banna Fonts are a custom-encoded rendering of the New Tai Lue (Xishuangbanna Dai) script. Two font families, differing only in weight, allow for a wide range of uses. The fonts are available for both Macintosh and Windows systems and include keyboard definitions. These fonts have been superceded by the Unicode encoded Dai Banna SIL fonts.

SIL Vai

The SIL Vai Fonts are regular and bold versions of the African Vai script.

Zaghawa Beria Font

Zaghawa Beria Font Annie Olsen, 2007-05-31; 10097 reads

Zaghawa Beria is a font developed from an alphabet which is based on camel branding marks in western Sudan and eastern Chad.

Namdhinggo SIL L

Namdhinggo SIL L font for the Limbu script Victor Gaultney, 2007-06-14; 7580 reads

Namdhinggo SIL L is a font for the Limbu, or Kirat Sirijonga, script used by around 400,000 people in Nepal and India. The current version uses a pre-Unicode encoding.

Fonts in Development

Development status

Please note that the materials offered in this section are still in development, and are made available for testing purposes only. Final releases may vary substantially from pre-release versions.

None currently available for testing.

Page History

2008-11-25 LP: added Sophia Nubian

2008-05-05 AO moved Andika from "Fonts in Development" to "Released Fonts / Unicode encoded fonts"

2008-02-21 JB added Tai Heritage Design Review

2007-06-16 VG added Limbu font

2007-06-04 LP added Zaghawa Beria font

2006-08-08 LP added Andika and Debian logo to Gentium, Doulos and Charis

2006-05-25 LP added Abyssinica

2006-02-03 BH added Encode Nums legacy font

2005-06-09 LP added ABS

2004-08-11 JW added SIL Vai

2004-04-15 LP changed IPA Unicode beta link to point to Doulos SIL

2004-02-04 KW Changed EzraSIL link

2003-10-17 JG Changed Gentium link

Backlinks (20 most popular; affiliated sites and popular search engines removed)
http://www.gottwein.de/Grie/Gr.Schrift.htm
http://linguistlist.org/sp/Fonts.html
http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/sp/Fonts.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-german/2004/debian-user-german-200401/msg...
http://www.geocities.com/sudan_dinkanet/
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/toc/set_eresource.htm
http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/search?invocationType=topsearchbox.%2Faol%2Fjsp%...
http://coursesites.blackboard.com/bin/frame.pl?item=my_inst&m=nzWYWgQpDRrjsqPc
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-user-german@lists.debian.org/msg66648.html
http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2004/04/doulos_sil.html
http://www.gottwein.de/Cap/Mythologie.htm

Add a response to this article

Note: the opinions expressed in submitted contributions below do not necessarily reflect the opinions of our website.

Reply
"SAlih Brandt", Mon, Jun 12, 2006 13:58 (CDT)
Naves Nastaliq

This looks like its going to be a good font. but the linkages do not work in OSX when using text edit which seems to be hte premier programme for writing in unusual languages.

Any hints from anyone?

Reply
"Jonathan", Thu, Jun 15, 2006 09:05 (CDT)
Re: Naves Nastaliq

The Nastaliq Navees font was developed for Apple's QuickDraw GX technology, part of Mac OS versions 7.x and 8. This system is now obsolete. It would be nice to update the font for current technology (Mac OS X, Unicode, AAT), but we have not had the time and resources to work on this; therefore, it will not work with today's software.

Reply
"pervaz khan", Wed, Aug 9, 2006 15:49 (CDT)
Re: Naves Nastaliq

dear sir is this font is for windows

Reply
jonathan, Wed, Aug 9, 2006 15:54 (CDT)
Re: Naves Nastaliq

No. See the System Requirements page.

Reply
"Khaled Hosny", Sun, Nov 18, 2007 20:00 (CST)
Re: Naves Nastaliq

Any chance this font (or at leaset the glyphs composing it and some documentation about has this font was designed) got released under a free software lisence? so that free comunity can pick it and, hopfully, port it to modern font technologies like AAT and graphite. I'd personally like to work on such font.

Reply
"Marcis Yarlyk.ru", Tue, Mar 20, 2007 22:11 (CDT)
Quallity

The fonts are really well-done.

Add a response to this article