Designing a New Digital Font for Modi-Script

Authors: Chatterjee S*

DOI: 10.23880/eoij-16000150

Volume 2, Issue 3

Abstract

The mature form of language is known with its script. There are many languages all over the world took help of other scripts to express its literary values in terms of human phonetic and literary wealth of human civilization. In the history of Indian scriptology Marathi language had used Modi script during 12th century. It mainly came into the eyes of researchers because all documents were found in Modi script during the era of great Maratha emperor Shivaji Raje Bhosale also known as Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. Modi-Script is one of the ancient scripts in India. Modi-Script was the official language to write Marathi documents and administrative papers till 19th century. Also, British Government decided to discard the use of Modi due to its complexity and non-uniformity and start the use of “Devanagari (Balbodh)”. Although, Modi was taught in the schools and it was used by the older generation till 1950. As time passed by the use of this very important script got reduced and it was on the verge of extinction. Fortunately, so many documents and manuscripts were found from the different parts of the world like London, Paris, Spain, Holland and South Asia. Number of researchers and historians have increased and tried to save this lost culture. Also, these precious manuscripts are suffering from decay and it can’t be manually handled or scanned, Hence there is a need for digitizing those manuscripts and make them available to the historians and researchers. So, there is a scope in designing a digital font for Modi script with proper technique which will help these documents and manuscripts to be preserved in the digital format. This thesis describes the designing of a logically modified font type for Modi-Script which will be useful for printing the educational books and for websites and mobile applications too. Also it describes the importance of the Modi-Script and why it is necessary to save this script by extinction.

Keywords: Script; Manuscripts; History; Culture; Values; Digital Font; FontForge

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