Web Fonts For Pali

You can download a special version of Acme for Pali here. SuttaFriends.org has a Windows application that can help you type Pali letters. Get it here.

Understanding Pali Font Problems

Not all fonts have all of the characters we need for Pali. You have three options:

1. Use the letters without the dots and lines, etc.
2. Draw in the lines and dots manually
3. use fonts that have all the proper letters.

To test is a font has all the letters for Pali, simply take this text and style it as the font you want:

aāiīuūtṭdḍnṇṅñmṁlḷ AĀIĪUŪTṬDḌNṆṄÑMṀLḶ

Here is a font that has all the letters:

And here is a font that doesn’t. You can see the only letter that shows properly is the ñ.

Sometimes they are very close, so we have to pay attention:

Where to get good fonts?

Google Fonts

The following are web fonts by Google that contain all of the letters.

me	Type	Regular	Italics
Gentium Basic	Serif	400, 700	400, 700
Gentium Book Basic	Serif	400, 700	400, 700
Gelasio	Serif	400, 500, 600, 700	400, 500, 600, 700
EB Garamond	Serif	400, 500, 600, 700, 800	400, 500, 600, 700, 800
Cardo	Serif	400, 700	400
Cormorant	Serif	300, 400, 500, 600, 700	300, 400, 500, 600, 700
Cormorant Garamond	Serif	300, 400, 500, 600, 700	300, 400, 500, 600, 700
Cormorant Infant	Serif	300, 400, 500, 600, 700	300, 400, 500, 600, 700

Bhikkhu Pesala’s Fonts

For fancy fonts, an nice collection can be found on Bhikkhu Pesala’s font page. Here are examples of the fonts he has created:

You can also go to websites like 1001fonts.com. The trick is to paste the sample text “aāiīuūtṭdḍnṇṅñmṁ” in the box where it says to add your text:

Then you can see the letters the font includes. For example here is a font that has several of the Pali letters, but it is missing ṭ and ḍ

Other

You can also find Pali fonts in this discussion thread.

Arima

By ndiscover.com
8 weights. Free. Available as a Google Font, but there it is missing the ṁ