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Hamm6457569

: Oriya font with full support for traditional ligatures I'm looking for an Oriya font with full support for the traditional consonant-vowel ligatures and consonant conjuncts. For example, if we

@Hamm6457569

Posted in: #FontRecommendation #Fonts

I'm looking for an Oriya font with full support for the traditional consonant-vowel ligatures and consonant conjuncts.

For example, if we go to the Wikipedia page on the Oriya/Odia alphabet, we find:


Vowel diacritics may be more or less fused with the consonants, though in modern printing such ligatures have become less common.


And beneath this a table showing all of the consonant-vowel combinations in Oriya, including many irregular ones such as ki:



And tu:



You can also see from the Omniglot article (and the Wikipedia one, too, if your font supports them) that Oriya has a very wide range of possible consonant ligatures, such as kka:



And kta:



I am looking for an Oriya font which is capable of rendering all of the consonant-vowel ligatures in the Wikipedia article, all of the consonant-consonant ligatures in the Omniglot article, and every base character in the Oriya Unicode block (U+0B00-U+0B7F).

I have tried a number of fonts, including Utkal, FreeSerif and Nirmala UI. All three fonts are attractive options - Nirmala UI especially so. Nirmala UI is also the font used in the Omniglot article and obviously has support for all of the conjunct consonants in that article, but where they all fall down is that none of them support the ligatures of consonant and vowel diacritics shown on the Wikipedia article, e.g. from Nirmala UI:



Although Nirmala UI does at least have a ligature for tu but it is not in the traditional style.

The font used in the images on the Wikipedia article, I happen to know, is e-Oriya OT. I was once the proud user of this very font, but it is no longer to be found online (it used to be available from the University of Hamburg) and I lost my copy when my old laptop went kaput.

Does anyone have any suggestions? For reference, I will be using this font in a short article about the script itself, so the only real requirement is full support for the variant and rare glyphs I wish to show. It should also be clean, neat and ideally sans-serif, but this is not essential. I have no strong aesthetic requirements, but I'm thinking more something that would look good in a novel or even a newspaper, rather than something that would go on a poster or a front cover. Creative, or faux-handwriting fonts would be unsuitable.



Edited to add:

For my documents, I usually use XeLaTeX, which has the ability to make use of OpenType features. This is quite niche, though, so for people willing to offer help, I also use LibreOffice Writer (version 5) and Inkscape (version 0.91). This is on Ubuntu version 16.04. I also have access to a Mac with a slightly old version of Pages and I could certainly borrow a Windows machine with a modern version of Word for printing purposes.

Regarding the problem characters, I know that Nirmala UI can support consonant-consonant ligatures, but here's a variety of samples in Unicode

କ୍କ kka, କ୍ଟ kṭa, କ୍ତ kta, କ୍ର kra, କ୍ଳ kla, କ୍ଷ kṣa, କ୍ଷ୍ଣ kṣṇa (wrong glyph used in the otherwise excellent Omniglot article)

The consonant-vowel ligatures which I really can't get (although a font with both would be ideal, but I could use two different fonts) include:

କି ki, ଚି ci, ଛି chi, ଜି ji, ଡି ḍi, ଡ଼ି ṛi, ତି ti, ଦି di, ନି ni, ବି bi, ଵି vi, ଭି bhi, ରି ri, ଳି li, ଲି ḷi, ହି hi

କୁ ku, କୃ kr̥, ତୁ tu, ତୃ tr̥, ବୁ bu, ବୃ br̥, ଵୁ vu, ଵୃ vr̥, ଭୁ bhu, ଭୃ bhr̥

You can see how they should look by consulting Wikipedia, or to make things more convenient:





But hopefully having the Unicode will make it easier to experiment.

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@Smith574

Odia OT Jagannatha has a few of the old style conjunct vowel ligatures (i kar and ii kar) but that's it. The old style is gone and there is little in terms of reward for designing an Odia font with such a niche use.

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@Dunderdale640

This is a very specific question, and you might have more luck asking where there might be more people familiar with Odia/Oriya.

Without understanding exactly what you're looking for, may I suggest you take a look at Noto Sans Oriya ? The Google Noto family is modern and hight quality, so it might have the features you need.

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