Type design

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 copy (body text), and follows the shapes and juktakshara (conjunct)s found in books printed between roughly 1810 and 1875. The typeface is Unicode‑based and OpenType, and is designed for reading, historical reprints and OCR training on scanned Odia books, apart from use in creative and other media.

Chapakala 20 is a digital revival of the predominant typeface used in print during the major part of 1900s. It improved on and succeeded the older typeface that was in use in the previous half century. Modern tooling and decades of experiments led to smoother, slender curves and cleaner forms. It was in use till the early 1990s when desktop publishing penetrated the Indian market and displaced the traditional letterpress. This typeface was never digitised and Chapakala 20 is an effort in this direction to allow for same traditional printing style of the 1900s in a modern setting with Unicode support.

Registry of Type Design (RTD) is a free, human- and machine-readable registry of typefaces, the people who made them and the foundries, presses and institutions behind them. It covers digital and pre-digital type in every script. Each record is independently sourced, has a permanent identifier and is published as a citable page.

RTD keeps bibliographic records for type design, much as library authority files do for authors and their books. As far as we know, it is the first open registry to do so. The data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0. Additionally, the records are machine-readable, supporting a JSON API, bulk dumps in CSV and NDJSON, and Dublin Core and MARCXML exports. Each ID also resolves as an ARK.

Librarians and archivists can match the names in their catalogues against RTD with OpenRefine. Researchers can cite a single record or study the whole dataset. Type designers and foundries can check how their work is credited. Wikidata property P14791 links records both ways. In October 2026 RTD held 260 people, 180 typefaces and 34 foundries and other organisations, in 55 scripts.