PG Thikriwala . . .

Thikriwala is a family of five clean, upright, highly-legible, display fonts of which four are openface varieties and one solid. There is a further Thikriwala font that is used to provide the openface varieties with an easy and accurate fill of a different colour or texture or whatever is required.

To make use of the fill, you will have to download the 'PG Thikriwala 0 Mask' font as well as any others that you need - or download them all.

These are the PG Thikriwala fonts that are available...

Underscore - The space above the font is fairly tight and there are special character combinations for bihari- laanve- dulaanve- horda- and kanorda-bindi combinations (as well as a few others) where a special glyph is chosen from the font (sorting out these special cases can take a significant proportion of a font's development and this is something that people who only design Latin fonts don't realise)

However, sometimes you will get collisions such as, in the text below-right, at the second word of the second line, (ਪੱਖੋਂ) where the adhak and the horda collide. To solve this, you can add an underscore which gives you an extra little bit of space - you can fine-tune this with your image processor's tracking if you want to. This will work in unicode as well as ASCII but if you need to add the space before the adhak, you will need to make the preceding character ASCII, otherwise, the adhak will show a coding error (the circle of dots with adhak above and to the right of its centre).

You can, of course, use the underscore character to space out the letters any way if you want to.

PG Thikriwala makes a good display font but it is also legible enough to be useful in body text.

You can see in the image on the right that the 'Open' (1) and 'Solid' (5) variants are useful at this scale because there is no loss of detail. However, in the 'Dotted' (2), 'Lined' (3) and 'Scotch Rule' (4) variants, the internal details start to get lost and the results are less not entirely satisfactory.

So, whilst all five variants are perfectly suitable for display work where you have a large point/pixel size where the fine detail of the fonts can bee seen easily, the smaller body-text role really only suits the Open and Solid variants where there is no internal detail.

Hinting allows you to align the filled pixels in the font with the pixels that the font will be mapped to thus making for an apparently sharper typeface when the pixel/point size is small and the lines in the font are only a few pixels across. It does this by moving the text slightly so that the pixels and the vectors in the glyphs align and in doing so, it changes the height and the width of the characters.

In the example on the right, I have shown what happens with a 51 pixel high piece of text without any hinting and with hinting.

Whilst the text itself is all right, the fact that hinting does not act the same on different fonts means that when you use the mask font, with hinting, it is rendered differently to other fonts with hinting. As you can see, the mask font does not match up with the open font if hinting is selected.

The hinting does this regardless of the size of the font so it does it the same number of pixels if your text is 51 pixels high or 512 pixels high. However, the hinting just changes the number of pixels wide and high by the same, it is not proportional so whilst it really messes up fonts that need to be matched at small sizes, it is barely noticeable at large font sizes. However, at large font sizes, you don't need to use hinting because the width of the strokes in the font are many more pixels wide.

In conclusion, when you are matching the pixels up in two fonts such as the mask font and one of the others, don't use hinting because: when the font is small, the hinting changes things too much; and, when it is large, you don't need it any way.

Production of two-layer-text images - So, here is how to use the mask font with one of the hollow fonts.

You can, of course, just use one of the hollow fonts (1..4) but if you want the interior to be another colour - or to use the interior for another texture/colour/gradient et cetera - you can use the mask font.

In the example on the right, I have a blue background (3) and have typed out ਠੀਕਰੀਵਾਲਾ using the '0 Mask' font (2) in yellow.

Next, I have simply duplicated that text layer and then changed to one of the other Thikriwala fonts and changed the colour to black.

Underneath, you can see the result. It is as simple as that.

Another use of the fact that the openface and solid fonts haven't got the fine detail to lose is that you can use one of the detailed fonts as the main title and either the open or solid variant as a subtitle with smaller text like the example on the right

Examples of artwork with PG Thikriwala . . .
Click on the images to open them up, full-sized, in another tab...
The images are 1920x1080p so you can set them as your desktop wallpaper and have a closer look if you want.

The Marquetry image uses three different woods, using the fonts as masks and also there is an edge imaged blurred and superimposed on it to give the effect of being at the edge of the wood.

Hover the mouse over the images below to show examples of font characters and weights

Download PG Thikriwala . . .

Download PG Thikriwala 0 Mask TrueType font 'pg_thikriwala_0.ttf': 40,708 bytes.

Download PG Thikriwala 1 Openface TrueType font 'pg_thikriwala_1.ttf': 53,784 bytes.

Download PG Thikriwala 2 Dotted TrueType font 'pg_thikriwala_2.ttf': 68,220 bytes.

Download PG Thikriwala 3 Lined TrueType font 'pg_thikriwala_3.ttf': 87,668 bytes.

Download PG Thikriwala 4 Scotch Rule TrueType font 'pg_thikriwala_4.ttf': 125,420 bytes.

Download PG Thikriwala 5 Solid TrueType font 'pg_thikriwala_5.ttf': 40,208bytes.

Have you got the latest version of one of these fonts? If you have just downloaded it from this site, you have. Otherwise, you can check any font file by comparing the hash function results of the file on your computer with the values in the list by clicking here for text file and here for a web page - opens in a new tab. Select the font file on your system and look at the properties. Compare the hash result against the values in the table. These pages are kept up-to-date so whenever I update a font or create a new one, it will be on there.

Download All Fonts

You can download all of the fonts from all of the font families on this site in one compressed archive by clicking here for a ZIP file or here for a TAR.GZ file

You have the freedom to use these fonts for personal or commercial use although you are forbidden to: charge for them; or, modify and distribute the modified font. If you want something different or even completely new for a specific purpose, email me - see below.

I allow you to use my fonts for free because I believe that morally, everybody should have equal access, regardless of availability of resources - In this way, those who genuinely have not got the money to pay a license fee for a font use can continue to access this resource for free. If I insisted on charging for them for private/non-commercial use then you would be looking at anything from around £50 for a single user.

If you are using the fonts for business purposes, you are not facing bankruptcy and your business model includes paying those that have produced resources that you are using, then you might want to consider making a contribution 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 production server 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

To give you an idea of what the commercial use charges are: the charge for a book is GBP100; and, for a single multinational film production, GBP1,000. Websites are free. If you are paying me for use, or just want to make a contribution, make sure that you send me any details you want to me to publish so that they can go on the contributors' page.

To make a contribution, click here ...

If you want to make a contribution directly using PayPal, my email address is paul.alan.grosse@gmail.com and please include your name and if relevant, your company and the project so that they can be included on the contributors page with a link if appropriate.

To see a list of contributors, click here.

Thank you.

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Copyright ©2007-2023 Paul Alan Grosse.