Type design
We study type history, develop and maintain open source typefaces for various scripts. Our typefaces are for publishing, archiving and language technology work.
Chapakala 19
Revival of 19th-century Odia typeface
Script: Odia
Designer: Subhashish Panigrahi
Period covered: Nineteenth century
Status: First release
Licence: SIL Open Font License 1.1
Repository: GitHub
Chapakala 19 revives a nineteenth‑century workhorse Odia letterpress typeface used in printed books, including work from the Orissa Mission Press in Cuttack (est. 1838). It focuses on the fonts used for body text rather than display styles, and follows the shapes and juktakshara (conjunct)s found in books printed between roughly 1810 and 1875. The font is built as a Unicode‑based OpenType family and is designed for reading, historical reprints and OCR training on scanned Odia books.
Chapakala 20
Revival of 20th-century Odia typeface
Script: Odia
Designer: Nasim Ali
Period covered: Twentieth century
Status: In-development
Licence: SIL Open Font License 1.1
Repository: GitHub
Chapakala20 extends Chapakala to a twentieth‑century workhorse Odia typeface that appeared across schoolbooks, magazines and general publishing till the end of the letterpress era (early 2000s). Together with Chapakala19, it aims to cover the copy fonts used in almost all Odia letterpress‑printed books, so that editors, archivists and developers can work with two centuries of Odia print using a single, open type family. This typeface will also use Unicode encoding and OpenType features as Chapakala19, with glyph shapes and conjuncts redrawn from twentieth‑century specimens.
Supporters
