WAZU JAPAN's Gallery of Unicode Fonts

Tifinagh

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Introduction

Today the script is usually written left-to-right, but in some places it's written from right-to-left instead. See the notes following the samples for more information.

Letter shapes vary depending on geographic location and language. And ligatures are common in Tifinagh. See the notes following the samples for more information about using ligatures.

Font Samples

font sample *	font information
	Code2000    [ show all samples ]  (code2000.ttf) Note: This font does not support Tifinagh ligatures. Source: Download this shareware font ($5) from James Kass's webpage. Stats: Version 1.16 has 61,864 glyphs and 239 kerning pairs Support: Arabic script (Arabic, Baluchi, Kirghiz, Persian, Shahmukhi, Sindhi, Uighur, Urdu, Uzbek), Armenian, Bengali, Braille, Canadian Syllabics (all syllabaries, all characters), Cherokee, Chinese (Bopomofo only, including Extended), Cirth, Coptic, Cyrillic (all or most of range), Devanagari, Ethiopic (including supplement and extended blocks), Ewellic, Georgian (Mkhedruli and Asomtavruli), Greek (including polytonic and Coptic characters), Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, IPA, Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji/Han Ideographs including Extension A), Klingon, Korean (Hangul only), Lao, Latin, Limbu, Mongolian, N'Ko, Ogham, Phaistos, Runic, Syriac, Tamil, Telugu, Tengwar, Thaana, Thai, Tifinagh, Vietnamese, Yi OpenType Layout Tables: Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Buhid, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Han Ideographic, Hangul, Hangul Jamo, Hebrew, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latin, Malayalam, Mongolian, Myanmar, N'Ko, Tamil, Telugu, Thai
	Hapax Berbère    [ show all samples ]  (hapaxber.ttf) Note: Supports ligatures and has a large number of alternate/additional Tifinagh letters encoded in the Private Use Area. You can use the PUA test page to see them Source: Free download from Hapax including a user's guide and an inventory of characters (both in French but still useful even if you don't know the language). Stats: Version 2.002 2005 has 1,109 glyphs and 30 kerning pairs Support: Tifinagh, Latin OpenType Layout Tables: Latin
	Hapax Touareg    [ show all samples ]  (hapaxtouareg.ttf) Note: Supports ligatures and has a large number of alternate/additional Tifinagh letters encoded in the Private Use Area. You can use the PUA test page to see them Source: Free download from Hapax including a user's guide and an inventory of characters (both in French but still useful even if you don't know the language). Stats: Version 1.002 2005 has 1,118 glyphs and 30 kerning pairs Support: Tifinagh, Latin OpenType Layout Tables: Latin
	Hapax Touareg DàG    [ show all samples ]  (hapaxtouaregdag.ttf) Note: Supports ligatures and has a large number of alternate/additional Tifinagh letters encoded in the Private Use Area. You can use the PUA test page to see them Note: Uses mirrored glyphs. Source: Free download from Hapax including a user's guide and an inventory of characters (both in French but still useful even if you don't know the language). Stats: Version 1.002 2005 has 1,119 glyphs and 30 kerning pairs Support: Tifinagh, Latin OpenType Layout Tables: Latin
	MPH 2B Damase    [ show all samples ]  (damase_v.2.ttf from damase_v.2.zip) Source: Free download locally. Stats: Version 001.000 / 002.000 has 2,896 glyphs and 192 kerning pairs Support: Armenian, Cherokee, Coptic (Bohairic subset), Cypriot Syllabary, Cyrillic (Russian and other Slavic languages), Deseret, Georgian (Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri but no Mkhedruli), Glagolitic, Gothic, Greek (including Coptic characters), Hebrew, Latin, Limbu, Linear B (partial coverage of ideograms and syllabary), Old Italic, Old Persian cuneiform, Osmanya, Phoenician, Shavian, Syloti Nagri (no conjuncts), Tai Le (no combining tone marks), Thaana, Tifinagh, Ugaritic, Vietnamese

 

Additional Information About These Font Samples

• Font sizes for the various fonts above were adjusted to make them roughly the same size for the sake of comparison.
   
• The characters used for the font samples do not necessarily form words but were chosen for visual variety:
  ⵛⴹⵏⵍⵀⵐ
  ⴽⴶⴷⵓⵣⴼ‍ⵜ
   
• Ligatures are common in Tifinagh. (They are sometimes called "biconsonants"). The font decides which ligatures (if any) to support and whether to create them automatically. Depending on the capabilities of the font, a user can cause a ligature by placing U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER between two letters. Likewise, U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER should cause the font to not create a ligature. (You would only use U+200C with fonts that create specific ligatures automatically.)
  
  The last two letters of the sample text above use a ZERO WIDTH JOINER to create a ligature: ⴼ‍ⵜ
  Fonts that support ligatures display a character that looks something like "]+[". Ones that do not display something like "][+".
  
  Creation of ligatures requires specific OpenType processing. You might be able to see the ligatures if...
  
  • You're on a fairly current version of Windows. This works on WindowsXP but hasn't been verified on older versions like Windows95 work.
  • You have a fairly current version of the Uniscribe engine (USP10.DLL).
    The BabelPad information page discusses Uniscribe issues, not that they're specific to BabelPad.
  • You use an application that supports OpenType ligature processing such as Adobe InDesign, BabelPad (free), Microsoft's Notepad, Microsoft's WordPad, and WorldPad (free).
  • You use a font which supports them, like "Hapax Berbère" or "Hapax Touareg".
     
• Historically, Tifinagh has been written both horizontally (left-to-right or right-to-left) and vertically (top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top).
  
  Today, the script is usually written left-to-right, but in some places it's written from right-to-left instead. The default direction for the Tifinagh Unicode codepoints is left-to-right. The orientation of the letters change depending on the direction of the writing. For example, "U+2D39: TIFINAGH LETTER YADD" looks similar to a Latin capital "E" when written left-to-right (with the prongs pointing right). When written right-to-left it is oriented like the numeral "3" (with the prongs pointing left). This is referred to as "mirroring". Fonts can support mirroring with the OpenType "rtla" (right-to-left alternates) table. However most applications (like Internet Explorer) do not support this table yet.

What's New?

Find out about new fonts at the "What's New?" page.

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announcements of new fonts for Tifinagh script
 

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Related Links

• The Unicode character code charts are available at the organization's website.
• Mondeberbere.com's Tifinigh alphabet pages (in French).
• Writing system information at Wikipedia and Omniglot.

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