Gurmukhi handwriting fonts

In Gurmukhi by HindiRinny2 Comments

Simple, everyday handwriting is one of the most surprisingly difficult things for me to get a hold of. (I hope to change that when I visit you people at the Typography Day conference! Practice your penmanship now!)

The wonderful “Billie the Cat” website offers plenty of free Gurmukhi fonts, including several handwriting-style fonts. I haven’t installed and played around with these yet, but I’m eager to!  (I need to sleep now!)

Forms that, like Bengali, to me look very different than the typefaces we’re used to.

I also came across a post about handwriting analysis on sikhphilosophy, to which the handwriting sample belongs.

“Studies of the same paragraph written by 200 volunteers showed the handwriting could be used to determine if someone was a native from a foreign country, a first generation descendent (born in India or Pakistan but who has moved to the UK) or second generation (born in the UK). The findings could have important implications for forensic science, for example if police were investigating a case where they needed to identify the author of a document or threatening letter.”

The sample pangram text reads:

“That night I closed my hostel room door from inside, was remembering my dad and I cried. I got admission in a government high school in Ferozepore.
There was a teacher from Rawalpindi there who wore a left sided turban, was of a small height and had a gentle face.
The teacher Balwant Singh was teaching English. He had no close friends in the school. Because of the fog he lost his way and fell off his bicycle.”

Hehe, kind of neat, eh?

Comments

  1. That example with the parallel handwritten and printed type texts is fantastic. It illustrates just the kinds of changes I have thought are behind the evolution of Gujarati and Kaithi from early Devanagari. You can see how the headstroke is not dropped, but instead it is abbreviated and incorporated into each letter in different ways depending on the form class each belongs to. Just what happened in Gujarati, as I see things!

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