Andika (, from the verb root for 'to write' in
Swahili) is a
sans-serif
In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...
typeface developed by
SIL International
SIL Global (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics International) is an evangelical Christian nonprofit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, to expan ...
for the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. It is designed for literacy programs and beginning readers, but also has support for
IPA transcription and a large number of diacritics. The font offers four family members: roman, bold, italic and bold italic.
Andika supports
OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corpora ...
and
AAT technologies for advanced rendering features. It is licensed under the
SIL Open Font License (OFL), and can be downloaded free of charge.
Version 6.2 of the font includes over 3,800 glyphs, including stylistic variants and ligatures. Stylistic variants include
primer-style forms of letters such as ''a'', ''g'' and ''t'' and the digit ''4''. The Andika New Basic variant has a reduced number of characters and a significantly smaller file size.
Variant forms of many characters can be chosen in the word-processor. For example, for non-primer-style 'a' and 'g', append
ss01=1
to the name of the font in the font-selection window.
[ (Features are appended with a colon and linked with an ampersand.) Alternatively, customized versions of the fonts can be created with TypeTuner, prior to download, that have those forms preset.TypeTuner Web homepage]
/ref> Features that may be chosen include two-storey 'a', loop-tail 'g', open-top '4', barred '7', 'i' and 'l' with a bottom curl, variant forms of capital 'Ŋ', capital 'Q' with a crossing tail, primer-style 't', 'y' with a straight tail, Vietnamese-style diacritics, Serbian-style italics in Cyrillic, staveless tone letters, slashed zero and automatic fractions.
References
External links
Andika homepage
TypeTuner Web homepage
{{free and open-source typography
Sans-serif typefaces
Free software Unicode typefaces
IPA typefaces