free ottoman calligraphy fonts with glyphs

To facilitate the Gulzar design process, font engineer Simon Cozens created two open source tools. Few font foundries wanted to take on such a large financial undertaking requiring a large staff and budget. In some of the previous Urdu fonts, designers had to calculate and draw all the possible thousands of letter combinations. There are various initial or medial forms of 29 letters of the Urdu alphabet that could potentially connect to one of 334 different variants to the left of the letter. In Gulzar, there are 9686 potential letter combinations. Since the Beh variants have different stroke thicknesses, appropriate variants of the Kaaf are chosen to match the Beh’s stroke thickness. Different Beh variants were selected based on the letter to its left. Yet both the Kaaf and Beh letterforms are different in each sequence. In the Nasta’liq style, each joining letter must connect smoothly to the one on its left and/or right with the correct stroke thickness and direction, following the calligraphy rules for the reed pen, the conventional writing tool used for Nasta’liq.īoth sequences start with the same two letters (Kaaf #1 in green and Beh #2 in orange). Then I associated individual letters with one another, until finally I was able to recognize them in their different contextual forms (initial, medial, final, and unconnected),” explained Cozens.Ĭozens worked with the designers to set up a method for creating a set of glyphs for the font. First, I learned to recognize the rhythm and overall feel of the design. “I gained familiarity with the script by carefully examining Urdu poetry, religious texts, and other materials. Like other languages using the Arabic writing system, the same letter in Urdu has different forms depending on its position in the word (initial, medial, final and unconnected ). Since he didn’t speak or read Urdu, he embarked on self-study of the written language. Simon Cozens was the Gulzar font engineer. To make it easier to design Gulzar, font engineer Simon Cozens created two open source tools.

Free ottoman calligraphy fonts with glyphs