Fonts
SIL designs and maintains free, open-source fonts that support the full range of scripts and writing systems used around the world — from widely-used Latin and Cyrillic fonts to specialized fonts for minority-language and complex scripts.
Unicode Fonts
Fonts are grouped by the region where they're most used. Special Unicode derivatives and older legacy fonts are listed at the end — most legacy fonts now have a Unicode version.
Global Fonts
 | SIL's Writing Systems Technology team has created very comprehensive fonts for Latin, Cyrillic and Greek script character sets: Andika, Charis, Doulos SIL, Galatia SIL, and Gentium. |
 | A sans serif Latin and Cyrillic script font designed especially for literacy use and the needs of beginning readers. The focus is on clear letterforms that will not be easily confused with one another. |
 | A serif Latin and Cyrillic script font, similar to Bitstream Charter, one of the first fonts designed specifically for laser printers. It is proportionally-spaced and optimized for readability, and holds up well in less-than-ideal reproduction environments. |
 | A serif font similar in design to Times/Times New Roman. It contains a comprehensive inventory of glyphs needed for almost any writing system based on Latin or Cyrillic script, whether used for phonetic or orthographic needs. |
 | A serif typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin- and Cyrillic-based alphabets. |
 | A font family containing most of the symbols defined in Unicode 3.1 for Latin-1, Greek (excluding Coptic), Macintosh Character Set (US Roman), and 850WE/Latin-1. |
 | Designed to provide most of the symbols needed to reproduce the textual apparatus found in major editions of Greek & Hebrew biblical texts. |
 | Developed to represent Cipher music notation, used throughout Indonesia and China for all kinds of music. |
 | Intended for debugging, this font contains a glyph for every character in the Basic Multilingual plane (including Private Use Area) of Unicode 6.1, each glyph consisting of a box enclosing the four hex digits identifying the Unicode scalar value. |
America Fonts
 | A Canadian Syllabics font in the style preferred by Cree and Naskapi communities of Canada. |
East and Southeast Asia Fonts
 | A font family for the Khmer script of Cambodia. |
 | A font package for rendering the New Tai Lue (Xishuangbanna Dai) script. It includes a complete set of New Tai Lue consonants, vowels, tones, and digits, along with punctuation and other useful symbols. |
 | A font family for the Kayah Li (Karenni) script of Southeast Asia. |
 | A family of fonts for the Lisu (Fraser) script of Southeast Asia. |
 | A font family for the Khmer script of Cambodia. |
 | A different style for the New Tai Lue script which is used by the Xishuangbanna Dai language of Yunnan, China. |
 | A font for the standardized Yi script used by a large ethnic group in southwestern China. |
 | A fully capable Unicode 16.0 font supporting all the Myanmar script characters in the standard, thereby also providing support for minority languages, in both local and Burmese rendering style. |
 | A traditional-style font for the Tai Tham script of Southeast Asia. |
 | A family of fonts that support the broad variety of writing systems that use the Miao (Pollard) script. Includes language-specific font families, such as Salaowu, Sapushan, and Taogu. |
 | A font designed to reflect the traditional hand-written style of the Tai Viet script, which is used by the Tai Dam, Tai Daeng and Tai Don people who live in northwestern Vietnam and surrounding areas. |
South Asia Fonts
 | A font family with support for the many diverse languages that use Devanagari script. |
 | A font family for the Kirat Rai script used to write the Bantawa language. |
 | A font for the script used by the Lepcha language of South Asia. |
 | Used by around 400,000 people in Nepal and India, this font has been designed to support literacy and materials development in the Limbu script and language. |
 | A font for the Gunjala Gondi script which is used by the Gondi (Adilabad) language. |
Middle East Fonts
 | SIL's Writing Systems Technology team has created a number of fonts for use in writing Arabic script: Alkalami, Awami Nastaliq, Harmattan, Lateef, and Scheherazade New. |
 | Designed for Arabic-based writing systems in the Kano region of Nigeria and Niger. |
 | Awami Nastaliq is a Nastaliq-style Arabic script font supporting a wide variety of languages of southwest Asia, including but not limited to Urdu. This font is aimed at minority language support. This makes it unique among Nastaliq fonts. |
 | A typeface fashioned after the square letter forms of the typography of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS), a beautiful Old Testament volume familiar to Biblical Hebrew scholars. The font supports the Hebrew and Latin-1 characters from Unicode 5.0. |
 | Named after the trade winds that blow during the winter in West Africa, is designed in a Warsh style of Arabic script suitable to the needs of languages in West Africa. |
 | A modernized East Syriac font supporting the East Syriac style of the Syriac script. The design is a resized revival of metal type cut in India around 1920, with support for required ligatures and diacritics. |
 | An extended Arabic script font named after Shah Abdul Lateef Bhitai, the famous Sindhi mystic and poet. It was designed by SIL Global for computer systems using OpenType for complex-script rendering. |
 | Ruwudu is the Manga word for “writing”. This style of writing is used by the Manga people in Niger, West Africa. This font was initially designed as a lighter or companion version of Alkalami Regular. |
 | Named after the heroine of the classic Arabian Nights tale, Scheherazade New for Arabic script was designed by SIL Global for systems using either OpenType or Graphite for complex-script rendering. |
Africa Fonts
 | A font based on Ethiopic calligraphic traditions. It supports all Ethiopic characters up to and including the new Unicode 14.0 additions. As far as we know, all languages using the Ethiopic script are now fully represented in Unicode. |
 | A Unicode font for rendering Tifinagh script characters in the Tamahaq, Tamashek, and Tawallammat languages. |
 | A font for the Beria Erfe script which is used by the Zaghawa Beria language. The script is built around a sampling of traditional animal brands. |
 | A sans serif font whose primary purpose is to provide adequate representation for Nubian languages that use the Coptic script Unicode character set. |
 | A high-quality font for Shifinagh script that supports the Tawallammat dialect of Tamajaq. |
 | A Unicode font for rendering characters in languages using the Neo-Tifinagh alphabet. It is a subset of Akatab. |
Special Unicode Derivative Fonts
We have created subsets of our Latin and Cyrillic fonts for different regions of the world. See Font Subsets for further information.
There are also fonts created using TypeTuner Web to choose particular features. See the Modified Fonts for Special Uses section of the linked page for further information.
Legacy Fonts
As stated above, most of the following fonts have been updated to a Unicode-compliant version. (Previous versions of Ezra, Galatia, and Namdhinggo can be found on their respective pages listed above.) If you have data written using a legacy font, we strongly recommend converting that data to a Unicode font. We have a text encoding conversion toolkit specifically for that task: TECkit.
- Legacy Encode-Numbers (Obsolete)
- Nastaliq Navees (Obsolete)
- SIL Apparatus (Obsolete)
- SIL Encore (Obsolete)
- SIL IPA (Obsolete)
- SIL Tai Dam (Obsolete)
- SIL Dai Banna (Obsolete)
- SIL Vai
- Zaghawa Beria
No longer supported
A family of Unicode fonts for the Miao (Pollard) script. |