Dave TrueType Font.

Why Devanagri (ਦੇਵਨਾਗਰੀ) characters in the Gurmukhi range? . . . There are many people who speak Punjabi, cannot read Gurmukhi but can read Devanagari (the Hindu population for instance - also many signs and so on are written in Devanagari so people will tend to be able, at least, to read Devanagari). The Dave font takes the Gurmukhi range but outputs Devanagari characters instead. This means that a piece of text written in Gurmukhi (using Unicode) can easily be displayed as Devanagari, simply by changing the font. The Dave font has five different styles: Book; Bold; Heavy; Script Left; and, Script Right. There is more to it than that because there are different ways of doing it... You will see below that combined characters that appear as: bindi/tippee followed by a letter; and, adhak preceded letters use a 'half-form' in Devanagari. These are written horizontally or vertically and in some cases, they can be written as either - where this is the case, there is a 'H' or 'V' font option. Additionally, 'eeya' and 'eeyaa' has the aerda changed into the Devanagari equivalent of yaeya. Where this happens, there is an option to keep the bihari ('B') or not use it ('A') ... so, if represented using Gurmukhi ਬਿੱਲੀਆਂ becomes ਬਿੱਲੀਯਾਂ ('B') or ਬਿੱਲਯਾਂ ('A'). As a result, there are four options for each font style: 'HA'; 'HB'; 'VA'; and, 'VB'. So, to summarise... Dave comes in five styles, each with four options These are the five styles... ... and these are the four options in each style... ... thus making a total of 20 fonts. So as to stop this from cluttering up your system, you can download fonts individually or in groups according to style or option One additonal point, worthy of note is that like Gurvetica, Dave uses Roman characters in the Roman range of the font and, like Gurvetica, those characters keep a consistent style with the rest of the font's characters. For those curious about Devanagri . . . If you don't know Devanagari, here is a very brief primer... On the right, you can see the Gurmukhi alphabet, along with the six paer-bindi characters and four other characters. On the far right, you can see the equivalent Devanagari characters. ੜ੍ਹ crops up enough in Punjabi to make it worth including here (there is no other way you would be able to figure it out). Here are the equivalent vowel pairs in Punjabi and Devanagari. This is what happens with the first four characters of the 'k' line when you apply an adhak. Note that when the character is not aspirated, you just double it up with its half-form. However, when it is aspirated, you use the half form of the unaspirated version of the letter (so, adhak-kh becomes k-kh because you can't aspirate a sound that has stopped). In effect, the first half form is the fist half of that letter - in Punjabi, the Adhak produces effectively two letters together so you only see one half form - the first. If you are not interested in producing text that can change back to Gurmukhi, you can produce multiple half-forms in the same way that you would produce a paer character, ie, by using the halant (normally the [d] key) - look at the word 'script' in the individual font listings at the bottom of the page. Here, you can see what happens to a bindi/tippee for each of the five rows. The font uses the following character to work out the correct nasalisation half form to use. If you remember that the last letter of each row is the nasalisation of that row's mouth shape, then using a ਞ to nasalise a ਚ makes sense. In English, we use 'n' and 'm' to nasalise and, when you think about it, 'm' usually precedes a 'p' as in 'pump' and 'n' precedes 't' as in 'hint'. Now, think about where you put your tongue when you form the 'n' in 'ink' and 'inch'. In Devanagari, this is all written down for you and the Dave font does this for you by looking at the letters that follow the nasalisation and producing the appropriate nasalisation half form for that letter. Examples of page used with Dave . . . click on the image to open it up full-sized in another tab... Hover the mouse over the images below to show examples of font characters and weights Download Dave . . .     Download Dave Sans Book TrueType font     or, individually ... dave_kha.ttf 123,184 bytes   dave_khb.ttf 123,284 bytes   dave_kva.ttf 123,484 bytes   dave_kvb.ttf 123,584 bytes         Download Dave Sans Bold TrueType font     or, individually ... dave_dha.ttf 132,332 bytes   dave_dhb.ttf 132,460 bytes   dave_dva.ttf 131,780 bytes   dave_dvb.ttf 131,908 bytes         Download Dave Sans Heavy TrueType font     or, individually ... dave_yha.ttf 127,840 bytes   dave_yhb.ttf 127,940 bytes   dave_yva.ttf 127,356 bytes   dave_yvb.ttf 127,456 bytes         Download Dave Script Left TrueType font     or, individually ... dave_lha.ttf 157,268 bytes   dave_lhb.ttf 157,440 bytes   dave_lva.ttf 157,192 bytes   dave_lvb.ttf 157,364 bytes         Download Dave Script Right TrueType font     or, individually ... dave_rha.ttf 157,644 bytes   dave_rhb.ttf 157,800 bytes   dave_rva.ttf 157,524 bytes   dave_rvb.ttf 157,680 bytes

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