Hind Siliguri is a family of five Bengali fonts, which are part of the Indian Type Foundry’s larger Open Source Hind Multi-Script project. Hind Multi-Script is a type system providing nine stylistically-matching font families – one for each of the following writing systems used in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka: Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, and Sinhala. In addition to Bengali, the Hind Siliguri fonts also include Latin-script characters.
Developed explicitly for use in User Interface design, Hind’s letterforms have a humanist-style construction, paired with seemingly monolinear strokes. Most of these strokes have flat endings: they either terminate with a horizontal or a vertical shear, rather than on a diagonal. This helps create clear-cut counter forms between the characters. Additionally, Hind’s letterforms feature open apertures. The entire family feels very legible when used to set text.
The Bengali and Latin script components are scaled in relation to each other so that the Bengali headline is more or less at the same visual height as the Latin capital letters share. The exact height of the Bengali headline increases vis à vis the capital height as the family increases in weight, just as the Latin lowercase does. Each font in the Hind Siliguri family has 820 glyphs, including many unique Bengali conjuncts. These ensure support for the languages written with the Bengali script. The Latin component’s character set is Adobe Latin 3, which enables typesetting in English and the other Western European languages.
Hind Siliguri is a solid alternate when choosing typefaces for UI design, and a wise selection for electronic display embedding. Jyotish Sonowal designed Hind Siliguri for ITF, who first published the fonts in 2015. Hind Siliguri is named after Siliguri, a city in West Bengal, India.
The Hind Siliguri project is led by Indian Type Foundry, a type design foundry based in Ahmedabad, India. To contribute, see github.com/itfoundry/hind-siliguri