November / October support extended to Devanagari and Tamil

November, our popular utilitarian street signage typeface, and its rounded version October, belong to Typotheque’s select collection of global fonts that support numerous writing scripts, and we are constantly working to extend them to cover more and more living languages. Download the PDF of October and November.

For our latest expansion we targeted the two most widely used Indian scripts, with Hindi and Marathi languages from the north and west of India, Tamil from the south, both prominent, and both able to serve as references for future expansions to other Indic writing scripts.

Arya Purohit, a type designer based in Bombay, worked on both scripts and both type families. With this project we have redesigned our production workflow, calling on Liang Hai, a Unicode expert and independent researcher into complex writing scripts, to draft a tutorial for the production of Indic fonts. Having tested this method on November and October, we have now published the document under an open source license. It provides detailed background on the text shaping of Brahmic scripts, explaining their logic and outlining techniques for turning encoded Indic letters and diacritics into rendered text. We hope that this will stimulate the creation of more Indic fonts, and also that November and October’s Tamil and Devanagari versions will help designers to create professional documents, signage, and branding and visual identities in these very important scripts.

Illustrations by Shiva Nallaperumal