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Mandala is a Pāli word meaning “Circle.” This geometric Sans-serif font is ideal for display text and headings. There are now four type styles — regular, italic, bold, and bold italic. There is now a character set for Basic Greek. A wide range of Latin Extended characters is included to support most European languages and Vietnamese. Arrows, maths symbols, general punctuation, miscellaneous symbols, dingbats, and ligatures are included.

This updated version 1.60 of Mandala has a full set of symbols and dingbats, and Currency Symbols for Unicode 7.0 and many OpenType Features. Kerning pairs were updated with FontCreator 8.0. Because many glyphs have straight sides, there are not as many kerning pairs as other fonts.

Version 2.10 adds fij and ij acute ligatures, localised forms for Romanian, smaller accents for Petite Capitals (using FontCreator 10.1 complete composites), improves kerning classes and adds a few more kerning pairs (now nearly 7K).

Mandala Version 2.20 removed code-points from the Private Use Area, removed Latin Extended superscripts, recalculated metrics (this affects copy-fit, so documents will need reformatting), added miscellaneous arrows, supplemental punctuation, miscellaneous pictographs and symbols, transport and map symbols, and added E, e, O, o ogonek acute in the Private Use Area. Colour glyphs were added for transport and map symbols: dartboard, info source, pagoda, no-smoking, no-cycling, no-pedestrians, no-entry, and prohibited. Dartboard uses figures from Mandala. Improved fractions feature to include lowercase a-z. Localised forms for Romanian and Velthuis encoding were replaced with stylistic sets. Subtables were added for kerning lookup. Added Coloured Stylistic Alternates for Decorative Drop Capitals. Used anchor based glyph composition for better positing of accents. Advance width for figures and maths/currency symbols were harmonised. Hinting was added for WOFF versions. Widths of super/subscript figures were harmonised. Added capital spacing feature at 5% of advance width. Added Access All Alternates feature. Added many more kerning pairs for lowercase and lowercase to Uppercase.

This is a very nice font.

I noticed that the font has some very stylish ligatures.

I found that the following line in blue at 72 point looks great.

The font is distinive and stylish.

William Overington

31 December 2007

I have to admit that I add the extra ligatures just because I can, and it is easy to do with the new Glyph Transformation presets. I don't actually use them that much, but the ct, st and ty ligatures work rather well in this font. Try:

The font is distinive and slish.

I may add those if I get around to an update.

Yes please.

There are some ligatures shown in a page about a Linotype font named Palatino Sans Informal Ultra Light, that page being linked to from the second post in the following thread.

viewtopic.php?t=1654

There is some overlap between those ligatures and those shown in your graphic, though there are a few additional ones.

William Overington

31 December 2007

The font is distinive and slish.

Having copied and pasted the above text into WordPad, it was sometime later that I realized that using the ty ligature in the word stylish means that the st ligature is not used.

It occurs to me that if, at some future time, an OpenType version of the font is made, with automated glyph substitution used, that the font would need to decide whether to use stylish or slish in the display.

I am wondering whether, as both st and ty ligatures are in the font, perhaps an sty ligature is desirable in the font. However, if the design for an sty ligature glyph were made by combining the way that an st ligature glyph is joined with the way that a ty ligature glyph is joined, would the long horizontal bar look wrong?

William Overington

1 January 2008

Mandala was updated with more glyphs and many OpenType features. This is the first OpenType version. Basic Greek glyphs, Petite Caps, Greek Petite Caps, Historical and Discretionary Ligatures, Stacking fractions, and a full set of superscript glyphs is included for text and ordinals.

Typeface Sample

Updated again to version 1.3 with some improvements to kerning values.

Mandala 1.41 was released, with improved OpenType features for Fractions, Alternative Annotation Forms, and Stylistic Sets. The font includes a comprehensive set of superscripts. Some glyphs were added include Turkish Lira to bring it up to date for Unicode version 6.2.

The script used to add the OpenType features was added to the archive and the Layout and Contents setting was reverted to version 3 so that features can be tested in the TrueType Viewer

Mandala was updated to version 1.60 for Unicode 7.0 using FontCreator 8.0 to edit the kerning pairs.

Version 1.70 fixes a bug in the OpenType feature precedence. You can now use Petite Capitals without disabling Standard and Discretionary Ligatures.

Version 1.80 adds ligatures for fff, fffl, sf, sfi, sfy, sh, and sk. The Ornaments feature can now be used to type chess symbols.

Version 1.90 completed the Latin Extended Additional, Number Forms, and Dingbats character sets. Eleven more General Punctuation glyphs, a slashed zero feature, and ffj ligature were added.

The archive includes smaller versions for the Web in both *.otf and *.woff formats. They lack most of the symbols and dingbats, but still have Petite Capitals and other OpenType features. They are not hinted, because hinting doubles the size of the fonts.

If you wish to add hinting this can be done easily with TTFautohint, which is also used when hinting fonts with FontCreator.

Mandala version 2.00 fixed the kerning classes bug and adds more kerning pairs. Some bugs were fixed.

I've updated this Web Font page, so it now uses the latest version of Mandala.

Erwin Denissen wrote:I've updated this Web Font page, so it now uses the latest version of Mandala.

Nice, but it needs some Ordinals: 1st 2nd 3rd

I've just added them, but the 1st conflicts with Discretionary Ligatures. It might be an idea to reorder the lookups, so Ligature2 (used within Discretionary Ligatures) comes after ChainingContext1 (used within Ordinals).