Noto Sharada font needs to be redesigned

[sridatta1]

Sharada is an important historic and currently minority script used in the Northernmost parts of India. The current Noto Sharada font has multiple issues relating to design, orthography, glyph shapes, support of conjuncts etc thus is unusable. Sharada is a historic Indic script which has never enter print and has complex orthography with contextual forms, wide range of conjuncts, similar looking confusables/ near homoglyphs, variants etc. The Noto font is currently designed in mono-linear Sans style, however traditionally Sharada is written with modulated strokes in Manuscripts. With the new Noto decision of Making fonts in Serif style if the script has been written only in Serif style traditionally ( for ex Noto Serif Dogra, Tibetan, Ahom, Noto Sans Siddham etc). Thus now font can be first designed in Serif style. I had previously shared resources on Sharada over email to the Noto team. I/We can help in the orthography, correctness, script related resources etc during the development of the font as an expert in the script.

[sridatta1]

@simoncozens Do you any further information about when the fonts would be updated or if there is any plan for it?

[simoncozens]

Hi there. At the moment, unfortunately there isn't a plan to commision a serif version of Sharada. Perhaps it would have been better to have commissioned a serif version first instead of the sans, but here we are now. I would love to see a serif version, but we have limited resources and other priorities (in particular, keeping up with the new scripts being added to Unicode). If there are type designers able to draw the serif font, I would certainly be interested in hearing a proposal.

[simoncozens]

It turns out that there was work underway that I was not aware of - yes, a Serif version of Sharada is in the works.

[sridatta1]

Thanks for this information. Let me know if I can help in providing details on orthography/ resource materials etc