The Ashoka Odia character set is rounded out by a series of Latin-script numerals and basic Latin punctuation marks. Thanks to the fonts’ OpenType features, these can combine into representations of all of the sounds required by the Odia language. The fonts’ character sets include 270 devoted Odia-script glyphs. The characters feature a mild degree of visible stroke contrast the amount of contrast remains relatively similar as you move up the scale from lighter to heavier weights. The family includes five fonts that range in weight from Thin through to Bold.
Ashoka Odia is also the first published typeface designed by NID-graduate Pratyush Das, and it is ITF’s first commercial release for the Odia script, too. As a design, it is truly a series of firsts: not only is it the first text typeface designed for Odia that applies Latin-style stroke contrast to the script’s letterforms, but it is also the first Odia-script font family that takes advantage of industry standards, including multiple related weights and kerning. Designers, editors, and publishers no longer have to rely on non-standard keyboard work-arounds.Īshoka Odia was created for use in long passages of text intended for immersive reading. Thanks to OpenType, all of the unique conjuncts necessary for a script-sensitive and typographically-sophisticated rendering of Kannada or Odia can finally be included in single font files. Built on the international Unicode standard, these eliminate the problems present in older fonts developed for various proprietary typesetting systems. Like all of our products, Ashoka Odia, Belur Kannada, and Sandur Kannada are OpenType fonts.
As such, they have limits regarding the number of glyphs they can contain, and they can’t easily be used by designers in apps like those from Adobe.
Unfortunately, many of the Odia and Kannada fonts available on the market today still rely on proprietary software solutions for typesetting. While Ashoka Odia began as a classroom project at India’s National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, Belur Kannada and Sandur Kannada are the result of a successful custom type project ITF undertook several years ago. Similarly, Belur Kannada and Sandur Kannada are our first Kannada-script typefaces. Ashoka Odia is our very first commercial typeface for the Odia script. The Indian Type foundry is to happy to announce the publication of three new Indian-script typefaces: Ashoka Odia, Belur Kannada, and Sandur Kannada.