Abhaya Libre is a text typeface designed for communications in Sinhala, Tamil and Latin scripts. Abhaya Libre project aims to produce the most advanced and complete Sinhala font with coverage for complex representations in Sinhala, Pali and Sanskrit texts.
In the true spirit of Libre Fonts movement Abhaya Libre project brought together existing projects and a group of designers to develop a coherent typeface. The project started off with the aim of liberating (open sourcing) FM Abhaya, the most popular Sinhala legacy-format-text-font by Pushpanada Ekanayake. Tamil glyph-set is based on typefaces by Modular Infotech and Latin was designed to match Sinhala glyph-set by Sol Matas.
The drawings for the original FM Abhaya was based on the common text typeface used by the Department of Government Printing in the 1970s—1990s. The roots of this style relates to the modulation structure and aesthetics introduced to Sinhala script by the N J Cooray of the Cooray Type Foundry in the late 1800s. FM Abhaya font which had a limited glyphs set in ASCII encoding was redrawn and expanded into a family with five wieghts and more glyphs. Driven by rigorous research and community contributions, Abhaya Libre includes an extensive set of ligatures, alternates, stylistic alternates, historical ligatures and Opentype features to support proper representation of text in Sinhala, Pali and Sanskrit langauges.
The Latin characters, that match the aesthetics of ‘Abhaya Libre Sinhala’, which was inspired by the style of the original Sinhala with an eminent contrast between distinctive strokes that go from thick to thin and was further modified to co-exist with the visual logics of Latin typefaces. The ductus references according to the lines of a Didone typeface add a touch of Sinhala form to certain terminations. Large counters have been added along with small ascenders and descenders for optimized screen viewing.
The name ‘Abhaya’ comes after the King Abhaya (474 BCE to 454 BCE) who reigned Sri Lanka from the ancient kingdom of Upatissa Nuwara.
The initial development of this was funded by Google Fonts. Project is led by Mooniak, a collaborative collective of designers based in Colombo Sri Lanka with the cooperation of Pushpananda Ekanayake, the designer of the FM Abhaya font and Sol Matas as the Latin designer.
See the discussions on Googel Fonts mailing list.
See the recorded discussions.
Now use on your website from Google Fonts.
/fonts in gh-pages branch contains draft fonts which are dirty, generated for design testing.TODO
See CONTRIBUTORS.md for details on contributions.
Special thanks to Dave Crossland, Sumanthri Samarawickrama, Liang Hai for consultancy and support. And thanks to all the tweeps who helped to spot errors and bugs.
Abhaya Libre font is released under the SIL Open Font License
For information on what you're allowed to change or modify, consult the OFL-1.1.txt and OFL-FAQ.txt files. The OFL-FAQ also gives a very general rationale and various recommendations regarding why you would want to contribute to the project or make your own version of the font.