Hinduism a Way of Life: Best Devanagari Typefaces

Absolute Hindu Monarchy. No compromise.

Apr 20

Best Devanagari Typefaces

Find few beautiful fonts among the slim pickings of this Brahmi based gorgeous script

Anatomy of the Devanagari Font

If one script were to represent the great Indian intellectual tradition, it would without doubt be the Devanagari Script (Devanāgarī or देवनागरी). Used for over 120 languages including the major ones such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali among others this is a very beautiful script. Even though it’s the native script for more than 500 million people, selection for typefaces are pretty bad. However, recent explosion of mobile usage across the globe might help curb these issues.

Here, I present to you a list of high quality Devanagari typefaces which I think are worth of use and praise. Hopefully, this encourages people to make many more.

Test text: अतिरोषणश्चक्षुष्मानप्यन्ध एव (The angry person, though possessing eyes, is blind.)

Sanskrit 2003

Sanskrit 2003 Typeface

Sanskrit 2003 from Omkarananda Ashram Himalayas is one of the classic Devanagari font. It one of the widely used typeface for Devanagari.

Chandas and Uttara

Chandas with its Northern style Devanagari

Uttara with its Southern Bombay style Devanagri

These fonts are very comprehensive with tons of complex conjuncts. In Uttara I’ve seen the best implementation of Southern Bombay style Devanagari.

Devanagari MT

Devanagari MT Regular

Default font for Mac OS X until recently. This is the Times New Roman of Devanagari. Best for printed text and long reading. Really well designed without sacrificing the beauty for functionality.

Lohit Devanagari

Lohit Devanagari Regular

Default font for Linux commissioned by RedHat, Lohit Devanagari is a standard fare. It was one of few early OpenType fonts and I’ll always be thankful for that.

Kohinoor Devanagari

Kohinoor Devanagari Light

Default for Mac OS and iOS, this font from Indian Type Foundry (IFT) is a well designed modern font. Very legible on smartphones and simple for beginners. This takes the place of Helvetica for Devanagari.

Noto Sans/Serif Devanagari

Noto Sans Devanagari

Noto Serif Devanagari

These open source fonts from Google are modern and really well-designed. I find myself going back and forth between this and Kohinoor Devanagari for any web projects.

ITF Devanagari

IFT Devanagari Light

This is a pretty well made font best for print and long form texts. I like the minimal look of this typeface.

Brahmos Devanagari

Brahmos Devanagri Bold

This iconic typeface from IFT captures the essence old movies titles and wall posters throughout the alleys of South Asia.

CV Ganesh

Ganesh

Though a non-Unicode font, this is a very popular typeface used in large print and we can see why. Really love the grounded feeling it evokes. It’s very aptly named too. Hopefully, this will be available as an Unicode OpenType font soon.

Aananda Akchyar