An Open Sans Based Webfont for Pali and Sanskrit
Traditional texts on the Dhamma are often written in Pali or Sanskrit, hence the need for DhammaTime.org to use a font that supports romanized Pali and Sanskrit, so that we can spell properly e.g. "Satipaṭṭhāna". Here are the results of that quest for you to download and use on your own website.
You might be familiar with the Open Sans font by Steve Matteson. Bhante Sujato added the missing diacritics, creating Open Sanskrit. This is a great font, but with around 115KB per weight/style file (bold, italic, ...) it seems slightly unwieldy for use on the web. And you'll want to include these files to avoid Faux weights and styles. So I grabbed a subset of Open Sanskrit that contains everything a standard US keyboard can type, plus Pali and Sanskrit diacritics, German umlauts, the Greek alphabet and a bunch of symbols that seemed useful. This subset I converted to the common webfont formats and added a CSS file containing the corresponding @font-face declarations. The webfont contains files for regular, italic, bold, bolditalic, semibold and semibolditalic.
Download: DhammaTimeSans-Webfont.zip
The download contains:
- An example html file demonstrating use of the webfont
- A CSS file containing cross-browser font-face specifications based on the Fontspring Bulletproof Syntax
- TTF and SVG files generated with FontForge
- WOFF files generated with ttf2woff (zopfli compressed)
- WOFF2 files generated with woff2_compress
- EOT files generated with sfnttool, part of sfntly (Microtype Express compressed)
License: Like Open Sanskrit and Open Sans, the DhammaTime Sans webfont is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.