Terma Foundry relaunches with Tibetan web fonts for any website

Terma Heritage Foundation has relaunched TermaFoundry.com, our home for Tibetan type. It now offers 29 Tibetan Unicode fonts, each served free from our own font CDN, so any website can show Tibetan in a good font with one line of code.

We are also drawing typefaces of our own. This relaunch prepares the ground for them.

Every font tested before it is listed

Tibetan asks a lot of a font. Letters stack three and four high, vowels sit above and below, and every operating system shapes the script in its own way. A font that looks right in a browser can break in Microsoft Word or on an iPhone.

So we tested each font on Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and Word, against every stack of modern Tibetan and the Sanskrit stacks of religious texts. Every font has its own page with its results, a box to type in, and its designer's name and licence. The fonts remain their designers' work. We test them and serve them.

Why a font CDN matters for Tibetan

Most phones and computers carry one Tibetan font, and not always a good one. A website that relies on it shows readers whatever their device happens to have: sometimes clipped vowels, sometimes empty boxes.

Web fonts solve this, but hosting them takes work. A content delivery network, or CDN, does that work once for everyone. The fonts sit on servers around the world, close to each reader, and a browser keeps them for a year, so readers who come back don't download them again.

Ours adds one more thing for Tibetan. Each stylesheet covers Tibetan characters only, so the font loads only on pages that have Tibetan, and the English on the same page keeps its own font. Two lines are all it takes:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.termafoundry.com/noto-serif-tibetan.css">
body { font-family: "Noto Serif Tibetan", sans-serif; }

Every stylesheet is listed at termafoundry.com/web-fonts.

Our own fonts

The first of our typefaces is a font for learners of Tibetan, children and adults alike. It is drawn with one even stroke, so the shape of every letter is plain to see. Thupten Chakrishar is designing it with calligraphy advice from Jamyang Chakrishar, a Tibetan calligrapher, and with Sonam Tsering, Director of the Tibetan Language Program at Columbia University, as script consultant. It will join the CDN when it is released.

Free tools for Tibetan text

The site also has tools that cost nothing to use. TermaOCR turns a photo or scan of Tibetan into text you can edit. The dictionary searches 64 Tibetan dictionaries at once. PechaForge lays out your text as pecha pages to print. Type effects are on the way.

Visit termafoundry.com to try the fonts.