Tibetan High-Quality Fonts


Tibetan Typefaces

Tibetan Classic Our Tibetan typefaces, designed and created by Tony Duff, are regarded as the best in the world. They are praised by Tibetan experts for their beauty and are unanimously accepted as the most authentic Tibetan fonts available.

Each typeface has its own, unique character and usefulness. The Tibetan Machine typeface is the standard typeface included with all of our software. The remaining typefaces can be purchased separately. Tibetan Calligraphic is a general purpose typeface excellent for all kinds of work. Tibetan Classic and Tibetan Chogyal are the highest high-quality typefaces available. The two are quite similar but Tibetan Classic follows the older style of calligraphy in which the serifs are shaped by hand and Tibetan Chogyal follows the newer style in which the serifs are drawn directly. Tibetan Chogyal is widely acclaimed by Tibetans as the best typeface available today and praised very highly by all as the most beautiful. If you want the very best typeface, this is the one to purchase. Dzongkha Calligraphic typeface is the Bhutanese equivalent of the Tibetan Calligraphic typeface.

We have several typefaces, all in dbu.can style. (We are not planning to produce dbu.med typefaces until the Windows operating system can support them properly, which will be some time yet.)

Tibetan Machine

Tibetan Calligraphic

Tibetan Classic

Tibetan Chogyal

Dzongkha(Bhutanese) Calligraphic

Click on the name of the typeface to see a quick view or obtain a description and sample pages of the typefaces.

Free Typeface:
The TibetanMachine typeface is suitable for Windows only. Its variant, TibetanMachineWeb, is suitable for Windows and the Macintosh. Both typefaces were put into the public domain under GNU public licence some years ago and are available free. Download them with the licence, the font source files, and documentation, from the download page.

Availability With our Software:
All our products come standard with Tibetan Machine typeface only. The other, higher quality fonts can be purchased separately, installed, and used at any time.

Formats:
Fonts are delivered in truetype format with with Windows products.

Encodings:
Our typefaces are available in two encoding formats: non-unicode and unicode. We continue to support our own, non-unicode format for Tibetan because, unfortunately, the Tibetan Unicode standard does not support many of the specialized characters needed for serious work in the Tibetan language. Our own non-unicode format does support these characters. In this format a single typeface comes as a set of five fonts containing a total of over 1000 characters. To see the full range of characters contained in our non-unicode format fonts, look the PDF complete typeface description documentation.

As well as the complete, standard Tibetan lettering set, the fonts also contain several hundred Tibetan-Sanskrit stacked letters and a complete set of half-height letters for easy production of any Tibetan-Sanskrit stacks not explicitly available in the fonts. In addition, there is an ex- tensive collection of specialized marks and signs needed for reproduction of all forms of Tibetan literature. Many signs and marks cannot be found in any other Tibetan typeface. E.g., there is a complete set of astrological signs, complete sets of sub- and superscripts, etcetera.

The unicode versions of our typefaces have the advantage that all Tibetan characters available in the font come in just one font. The unicode fonts are of exactly the same, legendary quality as the non-unicode ones.