Shobhika is a free, open source, Unicode compliant, OpenType font with support for Devanāgarī, Latin, and Cyrillic scripts. It is available in two weights—regular and bold. The font is designed with over 1600 Devanāgarī glyphs, including support for over 1100 conjunct characters, as well as vedic accents. The Latin component of the font not only supports a wide range of characters required for Roman transliteration of Sanskrit, but also provides a subset of regularly used mathematical symbols for scholars working with scientific and technical documents. The project has been launched under the auspices of the Science and Heritage Initiative (SandHI) at IIT Bombay, and builds upon the following two fonts for its Devanāgarī and Latin components respectively: (i) Yashomudra by Rājya Marāṭhī Vikās Saṃsthā, and (ii) PT Serif by ParaType. We would like to thank both these organisations for releasing their fonts under the SIL Open Font Licence, which has enabled us to create Shobhika.
Shobhika has been developed with the following objectives. The font should:
The following are the main features of the Shobhika font:
Shobhika is licensed under the SIL Open Font License v1.1
To view the copyright and specific terms and conditions please refer to OFL.txt
The latest release of the font can be found on the releases page.
Shobhika is compatible across different operating systems and has been tested on Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu Linux. To install on any of these, double click the downloaded file and follow instructions.
The unicode implementation of Devanāgarī characters is found in three blocks: Devanagari, Devanagari Extended, and Vedic Extensions. To type special characters which may not be found on your keyboard, do the following:
Would you like to contribute to the development of this font? Here is how you can help: Report bugs and issues that you encounter, or enhancements that you would like in the github issues page.
The font was developed at IIT Bombay under the guidance and supervision of Prof K. Ramasubramanian and Prof. Girish Dalvi, belonging to the Cell for Indian Science and Technology in Sanskrit (CISTS), and the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) respectively. The project was conceptualised and led by Aditya Kolachana at the CISTS. Design of the extensive set of Devanāgarī conjunct characters (based upon the characters of the original Yashomudra font), as well as additional Latin and mathematical characters (based upon the characters of PT Serif), was carried out by Yashodeep Gholap. The code to run the font was written by Vishvendra Singh Poonia and Abhishek Sharma, with help from Rohit Saluja. Faculty and friends from IIT Bombay and outside also contributed with advice and helped in testing the font. Rājya Marāṭhī Vikās Samsthā graciously re-released the Yashomudra font under the SIL Open Font License to enable the project to proceed and greatly encouraged us. ParaType designed the original PT Serif font.