Published: 15th July, 2016
Last edited: 8th July, 2016
Created: 28th June, 2016
My take on the Mongolian 'Phags-pa script designed by the Tibetan monk Phagspa in 1269, based on the Tibetan script, to write Mongolian, Tibetan, Sanskrit and Chinese. This font is based on the Tibetan style which consists almost entirely of straight lines and right angles. It seemed like a prime candidate for a FontStruct treatment. I've added rounded corners and serifs to make it more visually interesting.
The script is written in vertical columns top-to-bottom and left-to-right and thus needs to be rotated 90° clockwise and the columns then reversed.
'Phags-pa was added to the Unicode standard in version 5.0 in 2006. This font however uses an ad-hoc mapping to Ascii characters which admittedly doesn't always make sense. I kind of gave up in the end and started assigning a bunch of letters to digits. Letters are connected into syllable block by a thin line (mapped to '-'), usually on the right-hand side. A straight line clashed wth the serifs so I made it into a small arch.
The script is an abugida: the vowel ‹a› is inherent in each syllable and thus not written.
