Dasa (ਦਸ) is an informal, handwriting-style font. When we write, our hands can move at many different speeds. Even though Dasa is a font—and not actual handwriting—text typed with it looks as if it has been written slowly, not in a hurried manner. Think of it as closer to “love letters” on the handwriting-spectrum, rather than a grocery shopping list.
This slowness leads to Dasa’s even and static-looking letterforms. Each letter in the font appears typographically-informed – they look very much like printed characters, not like the ones taught in elementary school penmanship classes. Dasa Latin-script letters are not joining; each one lives in its own space, with the exception of a few ligatures.
This font is currently available, libre and gratis, via GitHub. It includes both Gurmukhi-script and Latin-script characters. This means that, in addition to Punjabi and English, Dasa can be used for most of the Western European languages that are written with the Latin alphabet, including Albanian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Welsh.
The font includes one stylistic set, discretionary ligatures, and oldstyle figures available via the “onum” OpenType feature. Among other things, this stylistic set offers single-storey “a” and “g” glyphs.
Several folders will be hosted here: releases, sources, and a test folder. The releases folder contains both PostScript-flavored OpenType fonts (.otf) and TrueType-flavored fonts (.ttf). The .ttf-files are auto-hinted with ttfautohint version 1.3. All of the font releases will be generated from sources that are files for the Glyphs 2 font editing application. The sources files folder will eventually also contain a UFO file exported from Glyphs, too. The test folder contains PDF files, and the .otf files used to set them.
All files are offered as-is, but support is available on request. Let me know if your like the font, or if you don’t!