The Indus Font
Design
ida is a commercial-grade, open source font for the Indus Script. It uses a design I call “Gol Gol Mota Mota” which means “Round Round Fat Fat” in Bengali. It hopes to make the script accessible and fun. It shapes Indus iconography with a larger weight so as to be better legible on digital devices.
The Indus Seals from 3500BC onwards have represented some of the earliest Typography in human history. 4,000 years before Gutenberg invented movable type, the Indus artisans employed sophisticated techniques to create clean and elegant typefaces that are comparable to our modern fonts. The ida font attempts to be faithful to the Indus aesthetic.
The Indus Script was primarily written from Right-To-Left although there some that were written in the Left-To-Right direction. Typically when written from the left, the characters were mirror images of the Right-To-Left ones. The ida font supports this by coming in both flavors – Right-To-Left which is called ida-Regular and a separate font called ida-Left-To-Right which contains mirror forms of the characters.
The ida font is a proportional space font supporting a full range of typography including more than a 100 pairwise kerned characters and complete Indus character support. It also comes in a Monospace font to support consoles and other legacy applications.
This is a PUA font based on Unicode’s Basic Multilingual Plane. It is a full scale implementation of the encoding specified in a Proposal for Unicode Encoding, also included in this site.
I sincerely hope you enjoy the font and its typography. I hope it connects us to a culture that was lost in time.
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Download and Installation
ida is distributed as three different fonts – ida-Regular, ida-Left-To-Right and ida-Monospace. You can download the fonts kits of the latest version (Pre-release-0-9-1) from below. This is Pre-Release software, use at your own risk. Please read the License carefully before downloading.
Each font kit includes an OpenType file (.otf) and a TrueType file (.ttf) that allows you to install the font on your system. It also includes standard webfont formats like .woff2, .woff, .eot, .svg, and .ttf files that allow you to efficiently serve the font from your website and support multiple browsers.
As an example, the ida-Regular font kit file includes the following fonts.
- ida-regular-pre-release-0-9-1.otf
- ida-regular-pre-release-0-9-1.ttf
- ida-regular-pre-release-0-9-1.eot
- ida-regular-pre-release-0-9-1.woff2
- ida-regular-pre-release-0-9-1.woff
- ida-regular-pre-release-0-9-1.svg
For further details on best practice for webfonts you can refer to a Fontspring blog post. As an example, as per their recommendation you would load the ida-Regular font in css in the following way:
@font-face {
font-family: 'MyWebFont';
src: url('webfont.eot'); /* IE9 Compat Modes */
src: url('webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'), /* IE6-IE8 */
url('webfont.woff') format('woff'), /* Modern Browsers */
url('webfont.ttf') format('truetype'), /* Safari, Android, iOS */
url('webfont.svg#svgFontName') format('svg'); /* Legacy iOS */
} License Terms
The ida font made up of the ida-Regular, ida-Left-To-Right and the ida-Monospace fonts are licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License.
You are Free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
Under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
- No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Notices
You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.
No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.
This summary is not a license and has no legal value. You should carefully review the terms and conditions of the actual license before using licensed material.
You must give appropriate credit whenever you use this font on any document, application or any other medium. The following gives examples of what may be appropriate credit.
Attribution
In text:
This uses the ida font © 2023 by Devajyoti Sarkar licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. For the font files visit https://www.vamra-vaikhanasa.com/ida-font/.
ida
font
by Devajyoti Sarkar is
licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
.
For the font files visit https://www.vamra-vaikhanasa.com/ida-font/