Hind Jalandhar is a family of five Gurmukhi fonts, which are part of the Indian Type Foundry’s larger Open Source Hind Multi-Script project. Hind Multi-Script is a type system providing nine stylistically-matching font families – one for each of the following writing systems used in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka: Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, and Sinhala. In addition to Gurmukhi, the Hind Jalandhar fonts also include Latin-script characters.

Developed explicitly for use in User Interface design, Hind Jalandhar’s letterforms have a humanist-style construction, paired with seemingly monolinear strokes (quite a common feature in Gurmukhi typefaces.) Most strokes have flat endings: they either terminate with a horizontal or a vertical shear, rather than on a diagonal. This helps create clear-cut counter forms between the characters. Additionally, Hind Jalandhar’s letterforms feature open apertures and counterforms. The entire family feels very legible when used to set text.

The Gurmukhi and Latin script components are scaled in relation to each other so that the Gurmukhi headline is more or less at the same visual height as the Latin capital letters share. The exact height of the Gurmukhi headline increases vis à vis the capital height as the family increases in weight, just as the Latin lowercase does. Hind Jalandhar’s Gurmukhi vowel marks take forms that tends toward the traditional end of the design spectrum, while the knotted terminals, etc. inside of the base characters feature a treatment that appears more contemporary. Each font in the Hind Jalandhar family has 475 glyphs, which includes all of the characters needed to write the Punjabi languages. The fonts’ Latin character set is Adobe Latin 3, enabling typesetting for English and other Western European languages.

Hind Jalandhar is a solid alternate when choosing typefaces for UI design, and a wise selection for electronic display embedding. Namrata Goyal designed Hind Jalandhar for ITF, who first published the fonts in 2015. Hind Jalandhar is named after Jalandhar, a city in Punjab, India.

The Hind Jalandhar project is led by Indian Type Foundry, a type design foundry based in Ahmedabad, India. To contribute, see github.com/itfoundry/hind-jalandhar