Gurmukhi/ Punjabi Fonts for free download. . .
These are both Unicode fonts and ASCII fonts so, whether you are using up-to-date Unicode design/display software or have a computer that will only display ASCII text, these fonts are for you.
Representing literally thousands of hours of font design work with the resulting fonts used in dozens of Pollywood films and on the covers of books as well in as magazines and papers, my fonts are available for you to download from these pages and use for free.
My fonts have been used in many films and/or their publicity material - see the 'Fonts In Use'/'Fonts In Films' page - these films including six of the 20 highest grossing Punjabi films:
Manje Bistre 2017; Muklawa 2019; Ambarsariya 2016; Bambukat 2016; Punjab 1984 2014; and, Vadhayiyaan Ji Vadhayiyaan 2018,
and ten in the next 20:
Jatt James Bond 2014; Manje Bistre 2 2019; Nikka Zaildar 2 2017; Lahoriye 2017; Kala Shah Kala 2019; Golak Bugne Bank Te Batua 2019; Ashke 2018; Nikka Zaildar 3 2019; Guddiyan Patole 2019; Nikka Zaildar 2016.
making a total of 16 in the top 40.You can see the extent to which the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the film industry from the lack of films released during 2020 and those that have been delayed until 2021.
The Gurmukhi fonts - 256 fonts in 32 main families (literally tens of millions of font downloads to date) can be used in commercial as well as non-commercial contexts.
If you are using the fonts for business purposes and your business model does include rewarding those who have invested in the intellectual property that you are using then you might want to consider making a donation towards the time, artistic and technological investment that I have made in these fonts as well as the ongoing costs of running and maintaining a server 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, along with the other bills that go with that and so on.
To make a donation, click on the 'Donate' button below.
Thank you.
All of the fonts here have characters both in the Gurmukhi UTF-8 range and also in the ASCII range. This means that you can use them with programs that haven't got UniCode capabilities as well as with those that have although you might find that you can do more with the font using Unicode, or that there are extra features built in so that things are done automatically by the font, such as contextual substitutions - look for the 'CSub' logo.
If you have installed a complete family of fonts, such as 'Raaj', and you think you can't see them all, look at the end of this page.
Note - When I originally compiled these fonts, the systems that they were used on, such as on personal computers in: word processors; image processors; web browsers; and, so on, used the character that produces a conjunct in a peculiar way - this affected paer rarra, pear wawwa, paer hahha and a few other conjuncts. That has now been corrected and as a result, I now have to go through every font and change the use so that it works with the programs in the correct way again. The simplest of fonts has anywhere between three and twelve of these and the more complex fonts, far more. Each font needs to be changed and tested.
It appears that a lot of the typesetting done on books and films has been done using the ASCII range characters anyway so this issue will not affect those users. However, As each font is done, it will be processed and then put on this website as soon as it is ready. I will be processing the fonts a family at a time, starting with the smallest families and as each one is completed, the menu item at the top of the screen will have a red tick - the one on the right
. Once they are all done, this message will be replaced and the red ticks removed. the process is fairly time-consuming and I don't know how long it is going to take me.
So, if the Unicode functionality is used by you and this is important, the red tick font families are the ones for you - the paer characters are accessible using ASCII anyway. Otherwise, you can use these fonts just as you normally would.
Font Summary Name Year Use Fam
sizeUnicode Notes Cont
subsLinks Lat Gur Dev Font Page Example N Soc High-legibility - Machine Bulara 2009 9 High readability font with body and display variants - also has hollow and bordered variants for display uses. Gurvetica 2009 48 Designed specifically for readability. Includes Roman characters that match style and size for each font. Gurvetica A 2009 10 As Gurvetica but ASCII range has Gurmukhi for those without Gurmukhi keyboard layouts. Art abstract Dekho 2012 5 Very stylised display font, based on Art Deco, making it good for medium-sized font work as well as display work. Dekho Naveen 2012 5 Even more stylised display font, based on Art Deco, making it good for medium-sized font work as well as display work. Latin range is kerned. Dwarka 2013 3 Monolinear Gurmukhi font in the style of Gujarati. Legible enough for body-font work and for display. Intelligent glyph coding in font. Magaz 2008 5 Very stylised display font, based around low number of horizontal lines, making it good for small font work as well as display work. Modhera 2013 5 Very stylised, 'rounded-serifed' Gurmukhi font in the style of Gujarati. Highly legible with many contextual alternative forms of sihari and bihari. Intelligent glyph coding in font. Rupe 2009 22 Based upon GHW Dukandar, this font is the stylised essence (ਰੂਪ) of practical, stripped-down Gurmukhi. Legible enough for body-font work and for display, includes bordered and hollow variants. Tsheg 2012 6 Stylised display font, Tibetan (Uchan)-styled Gurmukhi Tee-shirt/tattoo font. Over 600 glyphs. Uttar 2012 9 Stylised display font, providing part-way step to Tibetan-styled Gurmukhi. imitation Gurmukhi
Old Letterpress2012 4 This is before Gurmukhi settled down to the single Bani style in the late 20th century and has some interesting characters. Punjabi Typewriter 2009 3 Monospaced, mechanical typewriter with its limitations imitated in this font. fun Adami 2013 1 Stylised, 'fun', 'party' block font with angular cut-outs. Punjabi take on Adamski. Intelligent glyph coding in font. DIN 1451 2013 2 German international standard for road signs and so on - Very early design in the standard. Intelligent glyph coding in font. DIN 1451 A 2013 2 German international standard for road signs and so on - Very early design in the standard. Gurmukhi glyphs in ASCII range. Intelligent glyph coding in font. Gubara 2013 4 Very stylised, 'fun', 'party' font. Balloons form letters, helped by string and weights. String in different thicknesses and additonal balloons only variant supplied to help colouring. Intelligent glyph coding in font. Jashan 2013 1 Very stylised, 'fun', 'party' lively font - Punjabi version modelled on the Party font. Intelligent glyph coding in font. Julaf 2013 1 Very stylised, 'fun', 'party' curly font - Punjabi version modelled on the Curlz font. Intelligent glyph coding in font. - Karmic Sanj 2008 7 Handwritten body/display font simulating someone with a felt-tipped pen trying to do a neat job. Pachami 2020 1 Wild-West-style Slab Serif font. Plotter 2020 3 Plotter printer style font with paper-absorption blobs at the nodes of each line thus creating a unique effect. Rangdar 2013 8 Multi-coloured font - size and position font with font 1 and then select 3 or four colour versions. Intelligent glyph coding in font. Script/ Stylised Hand Writing Choti 2012 12 Short-tail-length handwritten script special body text Similar to Raajaa but with short tails. Lanma 2008 2 Long-tailed handwritten display script with full-length tailed paer characters for tailed characters. Suitable for certificates and other special documents. Raaj 2008 7 Medium-tail-length handwritten script special body text. Unicode Gurmukhi range uses paer characters that modify the tails where appropriate. Raajaa 2008 7 Tailless variant of Raaj, suitable for body text where space is limited Real Handwriting/painting GHW Adhiapak 2008 14 Handwritten text from a Punjabi Teacher, born and brought up in the Punjab, now resident in the UK. Combines standard character forms with speed, fluidity and humanity. GHW Dukandar 2008 5 Practical, no-nonsense, fast handwriting, just like your grandmother back in the Punjab writes. GHP Full 2013 6 Hand-painted sign-writing, complete with shadows, suitable for shop signs, banners, Tee-shirts, large headings et cetera. GHW Penti Akhari 2012 10 Late 16th, early 17th century handwritten Gurmukhi, just like you would find in important texts of the day. Includes 4 Larivar styles. GHW Purani Primer PDL 2013 1 Fancy, handwriting based upon a primer supplied by Punjab Digital Library. Contains many versions of letters according to context - all selected automatically in Unicode but all accessible through ASCII using code sequences described on its own page. Transliteration Iragan 2009 8 Converts Devanagari to Gurmukhi so Gurmukhi readers can access Devanagari texts online. Dave 2009 20 Converts Gurmukhi to Devanagari so Devanagari readers can access Gurmukhi texts online.
Regarding Unicode text: Note that whilst all of the fonts on this site work fine on UNIX/Linux there is a bug in some older versions of the rendering engine on Windows that means that in the Unicode range, some fonts will not display correctly in some programs on those systems. All of the fonts on this site work correctly in The Gimp - free image editing program - on Windows and UNIX/Linux but on some older versions of Windows, some programs don't process Indic fonts correctly.
Fonts work to differing degrees on those systems, depending upon how buggy the system is, you might find that some programs:
For example, Adobe Photoshop CS3 on Windows Vista Ultimate with Microsoft's own Raavi font falls into ths latter category, even though it all works perfectly on The GIMP on the same system with the same font.
- work completely well;
- don't allow ligatures in Latin (like 'ffi' and so on) used by some fonts to give extra functionality;
- have problems with conjunct formation
- might steal elements from adjacent conjucts in complex words (usually English words in Gurmukhi written with explicit conjncts)
- have problems with conjunct glyph element positioning
- ...
- don't even put a sihari before the consonant/conjunct.
Mappings
The key mappings for each of them is the same - you use the UTF-8 mapping for your system but the ASCII part of the mapping is the same as the Windows98SE mapping above on this page.
There are some additonal mappings in that:
- Exclamation mark is mapped to noon - ਨੂੰ - so that you have it all in one character;
- Shift-Backtick (usually the top-left key on the keyboard) is a paer wawwaa;
- Underscore is mapped to a short line so that you can extend the space between letters if you want to (say you need some extra space between an adhak and a sihari for instance);
- Minus gives an aunkard that is shifted to the left in the Raaj family of fonts - this is still mapped in the Raajaa family but not shifted thus giving you the ability to change between families without having to retype anything;
- Equals gives a dulaenkarday that has the same properties as the aunkard as described above;
- Plus give a tippee that is shifted to the left so that if you need it over a single letter (such as above a ਨ or a ਤ), you can make it centralised rather than over to the right;
- Less than and greater than give you two different versions of ੴ;
- On the handwritten fonts, 'Noon' - ਨੂੰ - is picked up in the usual manner to produce the
character;
- On the handwritten fonts, the word 'Singh' - ਸਿੰਘ - is special when written by hand, it is written a lot and, like noon, has its own form
; and,
- On the hollow Bulara fonts, the round brackets [(] and [)] give the end caps for the words (note that these aren't needed on the hollow Rupe fonts because the Rupe characters don't write over each other).
On some programs on some operating systems, you might think that you cannot access all of the fonts that you have installed.
This can be a problem with fonts that have a lot of weights such as 'Raaj'.
Normally, you will get a list of fonts that you have installed like the one on the right which is from WordPad (Windows Vista).
You can see all of the fonts that you have installed and you know what is what - even thought it has put them in alphabetical order rather than weight order.
However, some programs will try to be a bit cleverer than that and you might end up with a font list like the one on the right (this is Photoshop CS3).
In fact, all that has happened here is that the program as tried to separate the fonts into families and to a certain extent, it has succeeded - although not completely.
This list is actually a font families listing (so, we can see that it was wrong not to place 'Raaj Thin' in with 'Raaj').
On Photoshop - and a number of other programs - there is another set of options and here, to the right of the font families dropdown list, is the font style list.
Now, you can see the different styles that it offers you and largely, it has got this right - although not completely.
When I first came across this problem in an email, I wondered if it might be a problems with the operating system and font installation (this doesn't happen on the OS I use - SuSE) but it appears that it is nothing more than the program itself.
As for the 'Raaj Script' font, it has just renamed it for you as 'Raaj Medium'.
Ho hum.
Copyright ©2007-2020 Paul Alan Grosse.
