News Article
Andika Regular, phase three of the Andika literacy font project
(July 2011) SIL’s Non-Roman Script Initiative (NRSI) is pleased to announce the release of the Andika Regular font. Andika is a sans serif, Unicode-compliant font designed especially for literacy use, taking into account the needs of beginning readers. The focus is on clear, easy-to-perceive letterforms that will not be readily confused with one another. Since readability is a major goal, NRSI has fine-tuned how Andika looks in low-resolution environments (screens, web browsers, other devices).
In the five years since the release of the first Design Review font, NRSI has been receiving feedback from users and refining Andika accordingly. With this release, NRSI brings Andika up to the same character repertoire as Charis SIL and Doulos SIL (Gentium Plus has the same Latin and Cyrillic character repertoire, along with complete Greek support). Slight modifications have been made to the design of all the a-based and r-based characters. In addition to including all the features in Charis SIL and Doulos SIL, Andika has special alternate glyphs designed for new readers. These include:
Andika offers alternate characters which are easier for new readers to distinguish.
- Digit Zero with slash
- Digit One without base
- Digit Four with open top
- Digit Six and Nine alternates
- Digit Seven with bar
- Small i-tail alternate
- Small j-serif alternate
- Small l-tail alternate
- Small q-tail alternate
- Capital Q alternate
- Small t-tail alternate
- Small y-tail alternate
All of these features are extensively documented on the SIL website, where the font is available for free download. It can also be used with NRSI’s TypeTuner to create fonts with custom sets of default features.
NRSI is glad to receive user feedback for continued improvement of Andika and its other fonts.
Related links of interest
- SIL’s Non-Roman Script Initiative
- The Unicode Standard
- Graphite, an engine for rendering complex scripts
- ScriptSource, a reference to the world’s writing systems and platform for collaboration on computer adaptations
- “Balancing typeface legibility and economy: practical techniques for the type designer,” Victor Gaultney
- Previous phases of the Andika font project: Design Review and Andika Basic