Published: 2nd October, 2016
Last edited: 10th September, 2021
Created: 27th September, 2016
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.