Just don't hold me responsible for catching any typos.

March 18, 2010 9:19 PM

I'm looking for best practices and recommended fonts for typesetting Somali, Farsi, Tamil, Pashto and Punjabi (not sure which script yet). Do you read these languages? Can you point me in the direction of some good-looking examples? Thanks in advance!
posted by avocet to media & arts (4 answers total)

After I hit post, I realized I forgot to mention that I'll be working within established graphic standards, so I'm looking more for examples of clean type rather than slick design.
posted by avocet at 9:22 PM on March 18, 2010

I'm not a graphic designer, or speaker of any of those languages, but I know omniglot.com has links to fonts under each language description. E.g. Somali
posted by foxjacket at 10:21 PM on March 18, 2010

For what it's worth, the official orthography for Somali uses the roman alphabet — and at least here in the US, any time I see written Somali, it's in that same roman alphabet orthography, so it seems to have caught on in (at least some) expat communities as well as in Somalia itself. It's not clear to me that anyone's using any of the old Somali-specific scripts anymore.

Apologies for second-guessing you if you've got a specific need to write Somali in one of the other scripts, but I figured this might be helpful information.
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:10 AM on March 19, 2010

Somali was only codified as a written language around 1972, so if you are going to write in Somali it will be in the Roman alphabet.
posted by Think_Long at 6:37 AM on March 19, 2010