Autonym Font

A font that can render all language autonyms.

Language autonym means language written in its own script. Example: ગુજરાત, ქართული

If we want to show a large number of language autonyms, we cannot apply the usual webfonts to it. This is because when each script requires a webfont, we will end up using a large number of webfonts. This can cause large bandwidth usage.

An example of this use case is a language selector on a website.

Autonym font tries to solve this. The font contains glyphs and opentype rules for rendering the language autonyms. And it contains only those glyphs for a language. For example, for Thai, the font has glyphs required for rendering ไทย alone.

The glyphs for the font is taken from a large number of free licensed fonts. See CREDITS file for the full list.

pyftsubset tool from Behdad (https://github.com/behdad/fonttools) helped a lot in the develpment of this font.

FontForge is used as the font editing program.

Download

See releases Adding a new language autonym to this font

Assuming you know basics of Automake, FontForge, OpenType rules, Harfbuzz etc. (Sorry, font development is not that easy)

1. Identify a font that has the glyphs for the new language autonym.

2. Important: The font should have a free license that allows reuse of the glyphs. Don't violate any license. Give proper credits.

3. Use pyftsubset to subset the font.

   pyftsubset FontName.ttf --text="YourLanguageAutonym"
   

4. This will create a new font named FontName.ttf.subset.

5. Open the Autonym.sfd using FontForge. Merge the subset font using Element -> Merge fonts, available in top menubar. Alternatively, you can also use merge.pe from command line.

   ./merge.pe FontName.ttf.subset
   

6. Run make test to test the newly added glyphs.

License

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. See COPYING file for more information.