My second attempt at a font for the Marchen script, a Brahmic script used in the Tibetan Bon tradition to write the extinct Zhang-zhung language. It can also be used to write Tibetan. It supposedly originated in the Zhang-zhung kingdom prior to the introduction of Tibetan Buddhism in the 7th century, but no texts from that time using the script are known.

Marchen was added to the Unicode standard in version 9 released in June 2016. This font uses an ad-hoc ASCII mapping though. It doesn't handle stacked consonants which makes it rather useless. :P

This design uses the same rounded corners and serifs as my 'Phags-pa and Zanabazar Square fonts. The letters come in three widths. Combined with the medial 'y' there's a total of four widths that the vowel diacritics need to accommodate, which is a manageable number.

Marchen is a Brahmic script used in the Tibetan Bon tradition to write the extinct Zhang-zhung language. It can also be used to write Tibetan. It supposedly originated in the Zhang-zhung kingdom prior to the introduction of Tibetan Buddhism in the 7th century, but no texts from that time using the script are known.

Marchen was added to the Unicode standard in version 9 released in June 2016. This font is modelled very closely on the example characters in the Unicode chart which were designed (I think) by Andrew West. Like my other fonts it's not a Unicode font though but uses an ad-hoc ASCII mapping. Marchen, like the Tibetan script, relies heavily on vertically stacked consonants. I could in theory create precomposed compound characters for the most common stacks, but managing that with an ad-hoc encoding would be a nightmare. This makes the font rather useless. :P

My second biggest problem was that I wanted the vowel diacritics to be the same width as the base letters. These come in four widths. Add the medial 'y' which attaches to the right side of a letter and it turns into a huge mess. I solved this by creating extra "bars" that can be used to extend the diacritics.

This font, which used to be called Malachite, took me just over a year to complete. The overall design took the longest, and the remainder of the time was spent deciding on how to do the punctuation and the diacritics, some of which weren't forthcoming until recently. It is also older than listed, as this is a cloned version of the original that is no longer on here. I created it in late 2009, or early 2010—I can't remember; and, Minimum was the inspiration for it's creation. :)

You can get its updated version, now called Petahja, on Font Squirrel.