Exploring Devanagari Script: Calligraphic vs. Modern Typeface Design

[00:00:01]welcome to the fall tribute this is Thomas I'm back with Aaron again Aaron thanks for joining us again hi long time no see I know I missed you so ponch moves were we talk about fonts and their attributes on tribute and this time for a special edition I asked Aaron to walk me through with my blind ignorance about the megarian and how it works so all right so I'm here I'm this amazing student like anyone else trying to learn some new things and I'm very excited to do so so Aaron I'm letting you ride the ship from here sure by the way sensei what is the way yes well first thank you google for by the way thank you reminding me yes so this is this is supported by Google thank you google for making this happen so Aaron now you can go from here sure no problem so we're going to be talking about didn't agree fonts so Devon agree is a script found in India and it's one of 10 or maybe even 13 major scripts used in India although there are many more it's the fourth-most script used in the entire world so after latin chinese in arabic Devanagari is used so that's like 660 million people which is two times the US population so this is used by a lot of people so I'm glad you're here to watch this and learn more about the script it's used to write in Hindi Marathi Nepali Sanskrit and many other languages so it's mainly used in northern India for some of those major languages the two scripts are the two typefaces we're looking at today are Balu which is designed by echt i'p and this is actually available available on google fonts to use for free this is more of a I would say like modern display sort of low contrast design and we're going to be comparing it with ITF Devanagari which is released by Indian type foundry and this typeface is based more on traditional calligraphic sort of strokes and approaches so this is just a sampling of some of the characters but we're going to start looking at the major alphabet in the next slide well let's get started yeah it's because actually maybe I'll walk us through kind of know like what is delay from I think you don't know we're either script like what are these characters how does it read is there like Arabic or that ah yes affected maybe you want to start with like real basic like baby's first script like what do we what am I seeing here just let me let me show you here because this is gobbledygook this doesn't mean anything it's not a word but I'm gonna start breaking this down I want to show you this slide because this is like the basic characters of the alphabet so this is written from left to right like Latin you'll notice that there's this kind of strong headline this line that goes across most of the characters so that's very characteristic of the script and several other North Indian scripts do this as well there are stems kind of like Latin for a lot of characters but some of the characters kind of hang by a shorter stem there so this is actually an abugida which is an alpha syllabary I will explain more about what that means later so it's not exactly an alphabet there's a little more complication where those marks come into play but right now this top line shows sort of the basic vowels and the bottom two lines show the consonants so there's 33 consonants and 14 bowels in Devanagari let's see and also it's a single case script so you don't have an upper and lower case so this is kind of all you're gonna find so as you can see right here like I described at this bottom typeface the ITF degree it has more contrast and we're going to look at that up close when we look at letters specifically one by one we'll be able to kind of see how the pen stroke influences how the shapes look but yeah do you I mean do you want more information right now or should we get into the bigger bigger scale of a letter yeah well I think the only other yeah you noted that most of these letters connect is there a technical term for that connector rail didn't everything kind of hangs all for sure they I think they use we call it a Shiro Rika or a Shiro line top line are there's a lot of common a lot of words people use to describe it I think the proper term is Shiro Rekha okay well I don't have a horn but yeah there's a lot to to absorb there's a lot to look at move on to that more particulars first look at some letters up close because there's there's a lot there so you know this one I'm starting this is the letter PHA and so one of the things about Devanagari and Indic scripts is each of the consonants has this inherent vowel so I'm referring to this as PHA I'll get to that later sorry but this is you know for a purse ound and it kind of resembles an upside-down lowercase H you know with leg and under long line so if you have to use that to visualize what we're looking at now the ITF Devanagari you can see right here this is sort of the pen stroke angle angle now the Devanagari traditional stroke angle is kind of an opposite to Latin so Latin usually uses this so just you know for your readers to see a you know lowercase a wow that was horrible but you know what I mean you know that's what that's the angle used in Latin but Devanagari is kind of the opposite of that so it's angled this way as you can see in that paw and I'm mentioning that because it's interesting how in Devanagari a connection gets thicker closer to the stem where is in Latin letters you know if you have an uppercase H it usually sorry that's horrible it gets thinner joints then you're at the joint so I wanted to note that because sometimes when people are looking at typefaces they want to see where you can find influence of Latin versus a more traditional typeface so in blue you can see that this is more of a low contrast but also slightly more latin-based contrast in that they decided to make it thinner toward the stump so that's something I wanted to point out that's a difference between them and also traditional Devanagari typefaces they do follow this you know they have the angles shown there whereas bulu they decided to round the shape a little bit more make it more horizontal and vertical sort of endings to these strokes let's see what else we can talk about they both have kind of similar proportions as you can see there's there's no concept of like a true x height or a very strict medium line that all the letters need to kind of line up to in Devanagari there's a lot of kind of different steps and heights of different letter forms within it but these are pretty typical modern-day sort of proportions that you might see so I don't know do you have any more questions about this well yeah I mean that's great clarification about like the how that joints were handled right and the ankle distress versus how these terminals are handled over here yes you said there's no tentacle these are the different steps it actually reminds me an Arabic right there's different levels right within so I would be fair to say that objects with this shape profile like this shape right here they would ideally supposed to hit the same area would that be so they're consistent say there's another format I don't know it has like that or something yeah this would have to line up together so yeah there actually there is there are a few other letters that are somewhat similar like for instance we will see that in a moment and it's it's sort of form is like this and you would probably try to make that look pretty similar to this you would watch this white space that kind of negative space and try to optically make it seem a little bit similar so it would probably line up to a to a similar spot on the character so you know the same sort of concepts of there are related shapes within the script and you kind of have to learn all the different different letters and try to see how they relate to one another and and look at relative proportions one other thing while were here I realized so one of the things Devanagari typefaces is you want this line to connect up to the preceding and following character so just like in a Latin connected script if you're you know designing a font like that you need to have strokes overlap past the side bearings for it to link up correctly so that's one other interesting thing that you notice when you look up close at a font you can see up the side bearings right there the overshoots or negative spacing negative side bearings on both yes perfect cool sweet well I think oh haha Anderson I mean I'm using Latin terminology AZ yeah yeah what's what's the deal here oh you shall see ya in Devanagari and some of the other index scripts there are a lot of marks like vowel marks that I'll show you in a minute that do extend far up above and below there's also slick forms where you might stack another character underneath here and have a vowel stroke there's all sorts of different formations that require a lot of extra vertical space so when you're designing a multi script type face it's often quite difficult to start with a Latin type face and then what that has latin proportions like let's say you know here's my capital H here's where I put my accents on the Latin and here's the descender line and an accent in Devanagari you might require a lot of extra space above and below so it's kind of hard to make those proportions look correctly unless you're starting from the very beginning using you know planning both scripts at the same time mmm so it's almost like the allowance for white space vertical metrics needs to be a Whitney's be more aggressive and working with every area yeah yeah you need a lot of extra inter line spacing when you're setting depth angry otherwise things might clash vowel marks from the line above might clash with something above this character so we'll see oh go ahead no it doesn't more thing this uh speaking of spacing because I love spacing I always about I am noticing that this is you know as if it seems to follow I'm looking at the the side bearing negative side not side bearings the the letter space right between in the left and right sides right versus the counter on the inside it it seems to apply a similar principle that we see in Latin right basic we have an end for example pardon my bow my horrible drawing an end the point the the inner counter should be is it more or less than the letters next to it lazy I see next next seen it on that you know actually I think this does kind of depend on the style of typeface like you know you know some some typefaces designed for screen like for Donna for instance like they will have looser spacing than something tightly set like you know Helvetica or something so it's actually kind of the same principle applies for Devanagari typefaces you might see some that have a wider bit but for the most part the inter counter will be much larger than the spacing on either side yeah I would say so yes yes that's cool I mean it's cool to see that some principles still stand across because right is that you know the verdana is meant for screen more like readability so who acquires extra spacing over hydra fit for anymore a larger display a tighter fitting would occur would that be a pair of parallel yeah definitely and this is it's a huge pain in the rear to design an index scripts and change the spacing and the font because because of this overlap whenever you change the spacing of a letter then you also have to push push those back and forth and you know it's so it's it's pretty time-consuming if you don't get the specie right okay right things don't change okay fine my long long stalling on this one but it's very grateful that it got a good look let's check out this letter all right you know how we use the amino oh wait and then the Oh are we back on time wall I'm Connie I'm still in Paul I didn't jump yet there's one last thing cuz you know usually you in a row right in or land on tribute are you doing all right I was actually assuming you did that is this a similar model you're doing right now is this pas a general first letter you draw or think about I you know I do that's a very good question there there are round sided shapes and slightly more flat shapes so paw is one of the shapes that is slightly more flat on a side so I do use that often in the very early stages of a typeface and then the next character we will show sorry he is one that has round you know kind of around characteristics on both sides so I will use that in place of like a round an au shape all right now we can jump the next one now I'm writing this column yeah this is cut and this is a very common character in Hindi at least so there's actually several different ways to draw a car and you'll also see typefaces that have you know they'll always have like a round shape on the left side sometimes this will be more straight on the right side sometimes it connects here at the base but in this case in both of these typefaces the designers decided to leave both of these shapes kind of open which is kind of really yeah it looks I mean it's really interesting it's an it's an interesting look for a shape you know reminds you of like the infinity symbol or something in Latin that we're looking at and you know as you can see this calligraphic one still took that same approach of the sort of blunt calligraphic angle on the side but Baloo's sort of tapers inward so you see a lot more of that tapering in the blue shape where it fattens out here and you know gets thinner toward the stem so that's that's kind of interesting and a very like soft look to it so it looks very different yeah I mean when it comes to cut another thing that's interesting now that we're looking up close and really criticizing or not criticizing but observing the typefaces the ITF Devanagari they did use somewhat of an ink trap sort of effect like they did taper this in slightly here and here you can kind of see an angle so I think I think the designer there was trying to kind of eliminate some of the darkness that would occur if this were absolutely truly perfectly calligraphic so I think they were trying to make this a little nice advanced moves yep yeah you can see a little taper in yeah look at that yeah that's pretty interesting also this character really makes me look at seeing these side by side I am seeing like the thickness this typeface did decide to make this top Shiro reco line quite thick and then notice the difference in the blue design they decided to make this a little bit thinner compared to the stem the stem is a lot thicker and I think they did that in order to give enough room for for these kind of bulbous strokes that they're making so I'm just noticing that now what a delight where does that best practice or like what you know it's quite common for this top line to be slightly thinner and you know at that pen angle it would be even traditionally so I I'm actually I'm surprised that this is this thick as it is um but you do see this quite commonly that people do end up making that a little thinner to make room especially for screen screen typefaces this line isn't quite as like important when you when you think about like the the absolute crucial information you need to see in a letter it's always going to be happening here here or below it's not really like this line so it's okay to kind of shrink that that's very cool nice we are getting into the nitty-gritty I wasn't we're kind of getting some details should we move next your type is honor yeah that's true it's as advanced I thought it would be just basic but here we go okay so what is what are we seeing here with yeah this is tah and so this is one of the letters that doesn't have the lines straight across the top there are only you know there's only a few of them but this is one of them so you can also see here again that just kind of the difference in shape and feeling when it juts out on the side versus has a straight slightly more like modernist sort of take on the shape and also noticing this rendition decided to connect the stroke whereas this has an open and both are very accepted in common in modern fonts this is actually used a lot more I would say in new typefaces and this is a little bit more traditional something else to note is remember the proportions of the PAS it was a little bit kind of higher up but this style that they're both using it's very wide this is a lot wider of a character than the PAS we just saw and it comes down a lot further on the stem so that's something interesting in these Todd designs yeah yeah you can tell because I'm assuming in the what does it mean I apologize what's the name of this bar is that reading for this oh that uh let's see you know I I just call it the stem I wonder if they call it like a mm-hmm I'm sorry I don't even know the technical term for that I know it's just a line might be called a kana but I'm not sure if it's called that when it's a stem idea Donda I should ask my friend pooja anyway with a more technical term you can tell yeah it's much closer right the this these kind of territories here and here are very close to the end assuming these were the commutes were constant these stems are constant yeah yep definitely well by the way I'm no surprise I mean I guess make sense I have this neck over here right cuz otherwise without it I'm trying to read that yeah maybe well how would that water be turn out I'm trying to imagine how we look if it just does the path one this way in that way oh sure yeah but you know it wouldn't it wouldn't follow the calligraphic model if it did that it would have to kind of curve over or something and the other thing is you will see in a few minutes that there will be vowel strokes coming out of this and sometimes in a traditional typeface they look better if they have a little bit of like of a platform kind of just sit on so we'll see that too so you're saying the main traditional form really is more like this right and then this guy couldn't goes here and then we're like that actually traditional would have like a little bit yeah and actually okay if we're getting super technical oh man there's a lot of these characters that have a loop some of them were influenced by like script reforms and like typesetting technologies so for instance okay there's a character called vah that looks like this and in very old manuscripts it used to just be drawn like this without a loop but the loop as far as I know from my research I think the loop was kind of added as a as a way to make this character oh this is so complicated I'm sorry more discernible from this character MA which looks very similar in like low printing low quality printing yeah so they added like a loop I think plea oh gosh now I'm on the record saying this and it might not be true but I and I think ties one of those examples where you do see some old versions of Todd that don't have a true loop that it just has a gap but oh my gosh I might be I might have some okay yes I was just talking about looking similar to BA so MA again kind of has that's sort of proportion we were looking at with pas where you know there's there's this internal shape this has the knot though I would call this a knot I don't know the Devanagari or the Hindi term for not but it would be drawn like that so it does kind of loop over you might see typefaces that have like a true loop or blue this is very unusual and like a stylization so instead of this coming like that and being like a circle which you see more commonly in tight spaces this looking like a circle not they decided to try this sort of like flare like flicker up so it's very characteristic of this particular typeface and I'm I'm I know they're planning other weights of Baloo to release so I want to see what this looks like in other weights it'll be interesting to see what that would look like thin weights yeah I was gonna say probably low weight I think it's kind of relying on the impression on that flick to kind of make your I feel like it's going across right yeah yeah yeah so that's that's quite interesting to me and also again you can see in this traditionally this knot might even be larger if you were really drawing this with a calligraphic pen but they yeah they did that same trick where they kind of brought it in a little bit and made this a little bit more minimal I think I think they wanted to reduce it so Devanagari is is actually kind of you know compared to Latin it's quite a busy script there's a lot of angles and and curved shapes there's a lot of things happening and these knots that happen right in the middle of the words can sometimes they do look quite dark I mean it is kind of a visual you know if you're a native reader and you're reading this you do expect to see a dark spot but I think a lot of designers are now striving to make typefaces that maybe minute minimize that darkness I don't know if that's influenced by ID like Western ideas of typographic color if that's maybe influencing the designer to do that but it's just something interesting to see as a trend so even though even though this is you know supposed to be the calligraphic version this actually is more similar to the darkness of a knot in a democracy ape so that's kind of interesting to note it's fascinating yeah I mean the whole drawing because it's weird this an extreme angle here right series anymore it's kind of more like this form kind of like a 90-degree angle an angle 90 degree angle turn versus yeah I wish we had pens that could do calligraphic strokes in this preview but you know it would it kind of ends up looking almost triangular you know if you're if you're using the pen stroke because look at this they actually simplified this to a blunt this would be more like pointy we need to do the live calligraphy demo oh wait a minute look around it depends oh wait is this like the tenth in also Lt I'm talking about like this well it wouldn't be that sharp but let me think what's what would be an equivalent in Latin is there an equivalent are there any characters that have not that is I'd like a folding path right that relies on the stress that create this shape from olltii upon multi layering of strokes he would make with the clothes if I could think of you know what though there's another not that we're gonna look at that'll be an interesting comparison to this one that has like a straight edge so we'll look at one more not they're both called the same thing I think it's the next slide yeah check it out yes okay duh so duh this also has a not but as you can see it's kind of going the other direction so this is one of the hanging characters most characters kind of had that straight stem but there are several characters in Devanagari that you know just have kind of a mini stem and then they have like a shoulder that comes down and then they're kind of like you know they hang there from the top and this one you can see this has a little more sloped shoulder here and this one's more straight across both they're kind of common in modern typefaces and both you know both are seen also in calligraphic cases too I've also seen this sort of straighter yeah that's a good parallel to them on being into five on being even the ass but reverse asks basically right person is like this right versus yeah you mean you usually don't see this look like this is one of the more sloped ones I've seen in a typeface and lettering you can see these very sloped but usually typefaces it's a little more structured but yes it does slope quite a bit and then again that not comes here here we have that stylized not again where it doesn't quite you know loop back how you would think so but I mean I love this shape I love how they did that you know it is more of a constructed piece but the calligraphic stroke would be like you know what that or you also sometimes see typefaces that curve backward like that and it makes a much longer character so some old typefaces do that that's a little more old-fashioned but one thing I noticed so again with calligraphic stroke this typically an old calligraphy would be a very thin here it would be like you know the thinnest stroke you could imagine but here they flared that out a little bit to make it a little more readable I guess right yeah same here this is also flared out so this is another modern sort of take the tales can vary in length depending on the typeface style it's as more modern typefaces are being developed usually people shorten the tale but old typefaces it might be much longer I don't know why I'm telling you this well okay so where were the PAS be in relation to this I apologize no keep going on that's a control is it around here or like actually this yeah that's a good point because you know if we were talking about the baseline of it mm you know this the baseline probably was about there let me just visually we know it was high room we go back in this typeface okay yeah and these it was a little bit higher up usually Devon I agree some of these tales they go below they are they slightly go below that baseline yeah that's the most common I would say and then there's usually a gap here of a little bit it depends on who's designing the typeface but in good practice in my opinion it's good when there's a visual gap here so the opposite of a Latin typeface where you would want a round character to like have an overshoot I would say these round characters you don't in my opinion you don't want them to overshoot you want them to be above the line so if they look like they're kind of hanging otherwise I think they look too big that's my opinion though based on my research it makes sense if you have longer tails right sure you did the ones that this hahaha it really short here just foci weird right yeah yeah it's good for if you have a longer tail right like you would want that to go down further and have more visual space hmm so very cool very cool indeed I think I might have one more of these up close layers before we slide over to something yeah just generally again like eye is it fair I've been neglecting to ask about this is great thanks for reminding me like what's the deal what's the print principle behind this cuz it least seems similar to their paw account of parts but this seems clearly like these guys over have to all gain something different right right yeah the you're right so the right hand profile of this letter I mean it kind of depends on the typeface but I would say in most cases this knot is slightly to the right of this stem up here but this left side this can vary quite greatly both are both of these look totally correct to me because it is that kind of variation and in hand-drawn versus you know constructed forms all it needs to do there needs to be like a visual there needs to be a visual gap here it can't be too close to that top sheer Errico line but it also can't look too small you want the body of this to kind of look as prominent as that pod that we saw hmm so it does have to kind of occupy a good amount of space this this should be at least as wide as the path as far as I'm concerned and then you want that negative space here for it to be truly visible as like a round character so so this is good oh I didn't mention in terms of kerning and stuff like that most Devanagari typefaces have very minimal kerning there's usually not a ton of it you might have if there's another round character here you might turn against it and make a little bit wider space but because most characters have like a straight side on the side and there aren't there aren't really any there aren't many characters that have extreme angles jutting in and out there are some but not many but so you don't have to do as much kerning work I don't know why I'm telling this am I telling this okay okay so speaking of angular characters so this is the raw character which is one of the very few narrow characters this is the most narrow glyph now the rug construction this is one of the glyphs that could take a number of different sort of forms it could be really curvy like you could even you know have have a curved top rather than this you know straight this one has a straight it could go round like that there's there's lots of variations that that you can use I think because it's such a distinctively narrow character you there is a lot more wiggle room so both of these are kind of correct we've got that straight or a curved approach to come in here the raw typically like the important part is it's supposed to jut out to the left slightly and then come down at kind of an angle and this should rest wow this was actually a little bit shorter or this one's longer what happened here the other or maybe I messed up maybe the point size is wrong but it should kind of rest about at the baseline and this actually does stay quite narrow remember we were looking at the DA not and and it flare it out in this case the rah they kept that a little bit thinner whereas in this blue construction it's very kind of an artificial construction and they flared it out here I'm not I guess this this is also quite constructed in my opinion doesn't quite look a calligraphic but it's it's a little it is influenced by calligraphy it does have that blunt edge there but yeah so this is one of those characters that does have a stark contrast in calligraphy with that diagonal angle and is a lot lighter yeah is there any is there any other characters that have this variance of width so much because this has seemed very I mean this is dramatically wider especially in the you know ITF edition compared to the other characters those older ones seem relatively consistent with maybe the your Rao control being the widest of the rear like what's right oh you mean like the difference between these two type faces how how the difference in width between these two is a huge difference proportion this is a kind of thing we're more modern typefaces that have more regular proportions well lower old-style forms have more variants in what portion uh actually no I think this really depends what I okay I shouldn't say that I a lot of the really old typefaces like I'm talking you know looking at printed books from the 1960s like that sort of old text typefaces usually the raw is very narrow and they don't use like a big curved thing I think the curved thing is a little more reminiscent of like lettering in a big display lettering I don't see it as commonly in typefaces but you know it is very it is accepted and as long as the proportions make sense with other letters it's you know perfectly readable it also influences there's another character you'll see called saw which is constructed and ah what am I saying there's two other glyphs that kind of have a somewhat similar profile on the left-hand side so your decision with rah can also influence the width of those so I believe if we look at the other slides we'll probably see instances where we'll notice that this character that these other characters also look much wider in blue I think we'll find out I don't remember offhand we'll find out yeah yes let's see Oh education time okay now we're going back towards scripts use so here is what you were dying to know earlier so Devanagari is an abugida which means that it's not quite it's not an alphabet per se vowel signs are added by adding like I'll not really diacritics but by adding marks so these are vowel signs vowel mantras they're called so each consonant has an inherent a sound ma and if you want to change the vowel connected to the consonant you add a symbol like this so this is ma me me move may my mo Mao and this is mum which is mom it sort of nays Eliza's it or kind of shortens that vowel sound so and all of the other Indic scripts work in a similar fashion a begitu scripts they all kind of have this vowel sign sort of component there the brahmic ones anyway so as you can see here like so we add the long you just add this like kana this this long stem me this is difficult because in when you're typing so if you wanted to type the word me you would type ma and then you would type like the key that corresponds to the e vowel sign and then inside the font to the magic of the font shaping it has to push it toward the front of it so it moves in front of the character this is one of the difficult things like so in the past 25 years of taught you know font technology now with Unicode and and Indic scripts shaping this is possible otherwise you would have had to type you would have had to type the word in a different order yeah yeah now I'll have to go in first and then which is like horrible so anyway I'm glad so that's that exists so the other interesting thing about these foul signs in particular they you have to make a bunch of different lengths of these in a typeface to to correspond to the width of the consonant so like the cut will need one that lines up to its stem the run needs a short one that lines a minute you know and then the really wide or you know whatever carry the character needs a longer one so in a typeface there might be 10 20 you know there might be many different variants of this and this is well you also need variants so there are a couple of vowel signs I didn't put all the vowel signs on here there's also like I can't pronounce it and live there but there are a few that go underneath and they connect up with the stem or in the case of those hanging characters well actually that's a bad example but like there's some hanging characters and then you would put the vowel sign kind of centered underneath it and then you have these marks that kind of go up send more and more more anyway you could you can see all the different varying varying marks and depending on the typeface you can see in this one that's a very wide very large ooh ooh sines Leuchars and these are much narrower compared to the MA so that's an interesting thing to note these are also quite dark they're actually dark right than I would expect they kind of look heavier than the letter itself know to be really critical but yeah I could see it I could see that yeah like this theme Weibull because their size is so small and they're enclosing they look heavier bright bright yeah exactly but um so this is so these are also really important like I know you and I had some discussions about Latin diacritics and some of the previous font tributes about how big should they be etc etc and these vowel signs they are very important to be visible so you know they're not the same as making a diacritic like in Latin where you just want a little visual note you you definitely want these to be visible so that so it's easier to read the the word shape because it they're crucial information in terms of the vowel signs so Aaron also what I'm seeing in the I think May or my yeah yeah I'm noticing that the double the double verge you know that it seems to be reduced weight compared to a single form losing that in both yeah you can you confirm that that's a good observation yes in order to get both of those strokes kind of in this style you will usually see them drawn a little bit smaller like that in in kind of very old manuscripts you might see them side by side rather than kind of like coming to a point there's also a lot of variations you'll see there's so you know as you can see this this form is more kind of like flat and then kind of angles down you might see some that curve you can have variations that have like a loop there's all sorts of variations on these specific symbols but yes you're right these usually get a little bit narrower and sometimes like look at the height difference this one's higher than this one sometimes you see people trying to design this so it moves further to the left and doesn't get quite as high it's a lot of information and it's a big challenge to design these to fit and again like you said that's why this height had to be so tall to accommodate that mark yeah awesome that's great thanks for all that it's great also seem like the weight stress decisions over here right mm-hmm yeah so this will really impact you know this since this is calligraphic you can it does occupy a lot less or it's less dark you know it tapers off in a slightly more elegant way whereas this is quite bulky down here so we'll see in the text samples this is gonna feel a lot heavier than then this in in text settings for sure all right well we got here more education I hope everyone's still awake okay so this is another fun aspect of that every ITA's or at least okay and Devanagari script so let's say you want to combine two consonants to make a sound you're like an english th2 or something you know the if you wanted to do that remember I said each consonant has an inherent a or a sound this mark Holland or Barama it's it takes away it's like an eraser it takes away the inherent ah and if you were to type these characters in sequence SOPA + yeah you get this which is called a cons conjunct or this is like a compound consonant so now this is Pia so here are the other examples I've sorta plus y equals Pia you can also stack multiples together you might see yeah yeah so these are called like horizontal conjunct and sometimes in typefaces you might create these as individual glyphs like you might actually design a lot of these and fine-tune them and space them and and make these transitions happen you know as perfectly as you can or there might be some typefaces and this is more typical of older fonts where you just draw you know you draw like a bunch of half forms like this and then you Kern them together but as you can see a lot of these characters that have that straight side like these are the ones that had this that had that stem these are kind of easy to connect together visually they usually they'll there'll be some easy way to connect them but I'll show you some more examples and more difficult ones but this is kind of the gist of of creating conjunct consonants so yeah Oh crazy I mean this one especially these two er yeah it's really interesting cuz like this I can see clearly there's no feeling right here it's really a bang believe that right that seems like a really challenging in small sizes to get to clarify that yeah it is it is quite tricky and you know that the designer has to make a decision so like here they they kept that little point of the UH to make that really visible whereas here it kind of melds in a little bit a little bit more smoothly and it's not as pronounced so in this case this this might be harder for someone to read I would say is if they're if they're a new reader if you're fluent in you know in Hindi or Marathi or whoever he's using this in a word you'd probably by context be able to easily know what this is but you know if you are concerned with early readers or low vision or that sort of concern like this it might be important to kind of custom design these to make sure that those little pieces don't get lost I mean but yeah you're right it gets it does get really complicated and dark pretty quickly luckily can't content it's like they make up the minority of the formations in words usually you know they're they're not super super super common I would say you know it's not like every single word is necessarily gonna have a conjunct but it is important to for clarity to think about these okay vertical stacking I take it yeah we've got a few anomalies here I wanted to just show so these first two examples are yeah vertical stacking contracts as you can see so sometimes it makes you know kind of a logical form okay we're squishing these two and then kind of linking them up or there are some kind of stranger formations where you have like kind of the The Vow shape here gets squashed and pushed here and then they're using the the tail as like the stem of the law I mean there's there's some really interesting conjunct it's a lot of old Sanskrit Sanskrit texts use lots of interesting vertical conjuncts but in modern fonts it's not as common to see and actually a lot of in a lot of cases you might see people even handwriting this just as they'll use the Varela and and write it like that instead of making this I mean it just depends on on what people are familiar with or the fonts that they have but these are the more traditional forms but yeah they're very dark and complicated and hard to switch this information in there and then there are some other anomalies like the the raw character is treated very completely differently than how it looks if you have a plus you know roof plus of a-- it turns into a mark that goes above the character so that's very unusual and also the combination then a diagonal comes out of the the base of the character so there's there's a lot of thing there's a lot you need to learn when you're studying Devanagari I'm sure I don't know everything either I'm still there's still things I'm surprised about some special cases so it takes a lot of studying to design a very complete accurate typeface I would say yeah what's the care I mean what is the character set yeah it sounds like a lot of when you composite especially especially you composite work like what we talking like five hundred to a thousand if you if you make like composite glyphs I I would say a typical character set is between six seven hundred and seven hundred fifty glyphs maybe even a little more depending on how many vowel variants you have but yeah but I would say 750 you're probably good for for Hindi coverage if you're doing sons crits yeah it's probably a thousand glyphs it's probably a lot more because they have even more interesting combinations so it's a lot excellent okay everything together this is kind of a mishmash I wanted to put now that we've seen all of those things just showing you kind of shaped relationships scale relationships at those vowel signs here also just uh wanted to show like here's a difference in these two fonts and how they construct this particular sort of combination in the top they use a horizontal form in the bottom one they did the stacking so anyway oh my god are you overwhelmed yeah I think this is I think this is awesome it's interesting to seeing this approach can you walk us through that yeah that's great so remember when I was mentioning the book formation by vs. mah this is another similar one where is in older and older and that's not a word old older calligraphic traditions this would kind of be an open spot here but for clarity's sake now you see a lot of typefaces I think because of that script reform Linotype or whoever designed some of those typefaces they made a loop there to make it very visible and over time now people are kind of making it do curl they just it's just something to make sure that you notice the reason why they do this there is also a character called a gov which looks similar it just has the the top line like that so you really want to make sure people can see there's an opening and then perhaps this does shut above the base or the the Shiro lying a little bit and also yeah this this is one of the interesting characters and that the proportions are kind of different in this in this case they decided to make that bottom kind of angular and stick out a little bit further in this case more emphasis went to the top so there are some letters that have more room for variation than others so that's that's cool that you notice that while you're becoming a difference pert well yeah I mean I'm curious like when there's worse in text how you approaches it as a text study cuz I'm sensing overall obviously the color is darker on this top on the top on the bottom it seems this is slightly looser I'm just using now the reference yes yeah good observation yeah I would say that the bottom one is is looser and spacing and also you'll see the word spacing I think is a little looser in the bottom one I think ITF Devon I agree was definitely design a little bit more with text setting in mind versus Ballou which i think is this weight anyway the bold weight to be good for display sizes so we shall see that well alright alright yep we got punctuation oh yeah I forgot this is an important part of writing systems punctuation so in the olden days they've nog reused Donda and and there's also a double Donda which is this like kind of lotta line that doesn't have the she you're aligned it's kind of slightly maybe a touch higher than the Shiro and the base line but it's kind of a separated line this is actually quite close that is oddly close usually it's a little further away but that's what they would use for a period or for a full stop there's also a second version I mean it's it's used in like verses poetry the sort of religious texts and I can't quite remember I think in the end of the stanza I don't remember but but yeah in modern use though you still see this on some like you know news websites and modern uses this is still in use but I think it's becoming a lot more common for people to just use Western punctuation periods commas they use quotation marks they use Western question marks and all that but you'll see like for instance I'm sure that whoever designed this typeface they kind of used a similar style in the in the punctuation tried to make it fit stylistically and then also a really a sign of a good quality typeface is making sure that the punctuation like fits the height of the Devanagari which is often a little bit shorter than a Latin like in terms of the top line that's usually a Latin is is maybe a touch higher in most cases and also being aware of like closeness I would say Beaulieu this this is a little close I think here but making sure that the punctuation doesn't clash because I think sometimes it's an afterthought for multi script designers and they don't really test that but really high quality typefaces will will occur Kern and adjust the punctuation to fit dip robbery yeah so with to know it's one I'm I'm surprised at business I consider punctuation unit because it seems like these from I I like it's a stun saying you know the distinction is compared to your stem up and saying it's when it's not connected when doesn't have this bar across it if it's in a bar across they would you would actually yeah you think it might be something like this for example right right right cuz you because yeah because of that top line connection this actually you know this will stand out in a field of text you will notice it and it will kind of act as that. as long as there's enough space as long as it's spaced correctly this I think is a little too tight that it's it might get confusing but this definitely and usually there is quite a big space afterward yeah and last night I figured I this is by tool is right that's a mistake I think oh did you accidentally out of the spacer there or something no no I think they didn't turn that I remembered and I was I thought I would just mention it there's we have to do one sad face and the Fond tribute or it's not contribute oh there you go good oh it's making sure I promise we're getting toward the end this current you know they might that might have been current inward or outward yeah or or something but I think it's good to have a little bit of extra space I mean it's so busy as you will see in text text settings you probably wouldn't want this super close as long as the space on the other side of the period is enough I think it's okay for it to be floating out here a little bit Oh we'll see alright wait we're dead I can't move oh we're going to the next slide and line oh my gosh difficulties pardon me I thought they were like stop doing this this is too many slides there's only like four left they swear everybody okay what's a fond tribute without numbers so in modern context almost in in most cases people are using the like the style of numerals we see in Latin so I mean whatever you want to call them because technically we are using hindu-arabic numerals and well right so that's why that's maybe part of the reason why 0 1 2 3 maybe look a little similar to what you're used to because our numeral system was invented in South Asia was invented in India in terms of the decimal placements and all that stuff so but these are the traditional they've not green numerals there's also a few variations in other like I think in Marathi they they use slightly different style and in Nepali I think I can't remember but this is typically it but I should say these aren't you can see these don't have the headline which helps though they stand out quite a bit when you'll see them in text because of that hmm and then this also on the side is the rupee sign now this is usually related to the character it like the person who invented this symbol which was only recently actually that they got their own currency symbol it was like within the past 10 years it's based on the rah and then kind of like you know a Latin letter R and then they also just added another line in the middle of it so usually someone who designs this is kind of relating it to the did not agree letter R or wrong so I don't have too much to say about this and I don't want to keep us all day but as you can see they used you know just noticing the difference between the knots and oh I forgot to make this bold that's why that looks so different this is the regular weight of ith or lightweight effective tip wolde I didn't even notice till now the end check your work kids okay hmm do you want to look at text samples instead of yeah shall we okay let's do that this is what actual Hindi looks like now we've got the real deal so like we were saying I think we okay so now you can see like how big those symbols the vowel signs and marks actually look compared to the script you can also notice here like how far down some of these hanging hanging characters go also check this out this is actually a very common character combination who in Hindi and it has a mark above and a mark but you know below it it's incredibly tall and then you can also see here here's some interesting differences in the typeface this is a half cup connected to you and here's their half cup which is not connected at the bottom which is just a stylistic change but yeah this is kind of like typical word lengths and sort of some combinations of signs that you would see so what do you what do you think when you see this Thomas you know it's what are you bringing this out like you see the word space pretty prominently how did you seems to be looser you think you were set before and I could see that between the two and I think I'm really in it's got amazing how tall this one is it actually feeling the letter O letters are shrunken down make it fit fascinating okay cool yeah and I can see really clearly the the stress relationship right and they kinda nature of the the contrast and ID's and ITF really clearly versus a more even color night meeting call it authority but the the the lack of variants of contrast and in Baloo right yeah and it was really it was really hard for these designers to try to make it as even it as it is considering you know like the density of like the character and combining these things I mean this this is really hard to do so I mean I commend them for trying to kind of squish this and manipulate it to make it look as even as it is definitely you know sticking to calligraphic models that are naturally suited to the letter shapes because you know if they're you know in if they're if they're kind of developing in tandem then things are gonna make a little bit more logical sense I mean in terms of how strokes connect in the density and stuff so you know obviously I would rather read a page of this and this is better for headlines for sure I do have one more text sample which is denser text if you don't take a look you know the headline base yeah this is whoa yep you could definitely see it filled in here yeah it's crazy so as you can see like I was saying like the built in line you know the letting it does need to be looser than maybe it's a Latin in to accommodate and you can see here the numerals they really do stick out you don't haven't had the punctuation of that bar in here do you oh shoot I didn't add it no I I could see your demonstration though like based on what this does yeah as long as those bars were spaced loose enough you can probably pretty clearly tell the difference well this is nothing he walked me through what's going on here like why is this this one as a but it's not connected to either one left and right is that serious separate completely yes actually yeah there are one letter like one letter words in Hindi so this is math this is like a separate word but you know in both cases I think the letter the word spacing is kind of tight in both of these typefaces [Music] I'll just say that or at least to me I mean I wish or at least looking at it right now I kind of wish that was looser but um yeah and the same thing here like here's another word but notice okay one of the exceptions to the rule this is letter ah this this doesn't have a major yet a connector line and notice how much bigger this gap is so it - compared to the space character I mean yeah you know it kind of like wasn't turned against the space character which maybe you don't need to but if you're looking at this from a let from Latin eyes you might notice that gap versus this gap I'm not sure maybe if you've read I you know I I know a little bit of Hindi I tried studying it I'm horrible so I'm I don't consider myself an actual Hindi reader so I definitely when I work on typefaces I try to get native readers to look at things and obviously they'll see tons of stuff that I'm able to see what does an example would you basically would you normally want to Corrine that they get that's amazing this this character to be in the middle between the two after there were spaces yeah I might or I might try to at least design the so it's not quite so loose on that side if that's possible at all but yeah you might want to maybe negatively crew net or yeah I'm not sure I don't know but it's not that well could you walk me could you just you know from a that's from my Aladdin training you know I'm watching I'm looking for the word space versus the inter spacing of the characters right yeah yeah so walk me through that in terms of what is there a general guideline or reference points because it feels like to me at least from my perspective this seems well like this one seems relatively recent or reasonable in that arrangement with my eyes but your your perspective you feel like the worst face should be just generally larger or more looser spaced or me maybe I'm just reacting to it in that it's there's some unevenness like for instance okay so this is a character we didn't talk about this is considered a vowel it looks like a : it's like a hound in this typeface they have it underneath the Shiro Rekha which I believe is well I don't know which one is technically like correct and maybe they're both but I'm mentioning that because I'm noticing like I do notice the really big space gaps that do occur during some of those so maybe that's why I'm feeling I wish that the rest of it were a little bit looser just because I'm noticing that I don't know I mean I think like with any typeface it really depends on the context and the intended size I need to look at this at true text sizes to see what I would say but I'm sure it's fine it's it's fine it's fine I'm just being nitpicky because we get those gaps it works it works but for a slightly more dense typeface I do think the blue maybe I wish it were a slightly bit lighter but hey if you're designing something you can always change the settings in a website or a decide document I don't know do what you want but it looks good obviously native readers are are going to have a different idea about the space character than I would so I'm like I'm like a two-year-old reading that's the level I'm at okay so this is our conclusion Devanagari is dense there's a lot of shape variation a lot of different vowel strokes and components there's a lot going on I and I mean hopefully the viewers got to see the difference between sort of a calligraphic contrast and the thicker sort of display style of blue and hopefully that made some sense excellent very well I learned a lot from this okay cool Chuck it was any commentary or anyone had any questions for us great let's check it out the case [Music] it's nice to know that apparently a lot of things we learned in Latin world actually applies or actually don't it comprehensible yeah it's cool that I mean it's it's hard because there's not there are really aren't many resources out there to like learn a lot about designing Devanagari or other index script typefaces it's it is hard it's kind of yeah I was I'll just talk while you're there questions oh by the way I think I goofed up the recording setup so we recorded but not never well yeah I'm sorry everyone okay well let me you know people could send me emails or you can write comments at the bottom of the video that would be even that way but we're not real life but it's okay that's my two things sorry everyone yeah and we can discuss this and hopefully also some native readers maybe even native disease you know Hindi or Marathi or Nepali speaking designers can also comment and correct me on all the things that I got wrong so well I learned a lot from this Aaron and I hope I think everyone else did as well so Aaron thanks for thanks for being our guide through learning about different garyun script really appreciate it sure thanks Thomas I think everyone bye