Choosing a Gurmukhi font for print and screen

Gurmukhi typefaces fall into three broad groups, and Tat Khalsa publishes one of each:

• Handwritten, such as Riyasti Hathlikhat. These imitate a pen, with varying stroke weight and a slight irregularity in the headline. They read as warm and personal and suit quotations, greetings, invitations and social media posts. Set them large: at body-text sizes the irregularity becomes noise.
• Manuscript, such as Puratan Hathlikhat Sampuran. These reproduce the letterforms of the puratan handwritten saroops: open yayya, long sihari strokes, compact subjoined letters. Use them where authenticity matters, such as gutka covers, hashiya artwork, exhibition panels and titles of Gurbani in print.
• Modern, such as Riyasti Naveen. Clean, even strokes with a consistent headline, drawn for reading. Use them for body text, documents, apps, websites and signage.

Screens are lower resolution than paper, and Gurmukhi has small details that suffer first: the dots of bindi and nukta, the tiny subjoined letters, and the gap between a letter and its headline. For screen use, prefer fonts with:

• a large x-height and open counters (the space inside ਕ, ਫ, ਖ);
• low stroke contrast, so thin strokes do not vanish at 14 to 16 pixels;
• clearly separated vowel signs, especially sihari and bihari, which can collide with neighbouring letters in condensed designs.

Print forgives all of that. A handwritten or manuscript face that looks muddy on a phone will usually look fine at 300 dpi, so judge print fonts on paper or in a PDF at full size, not on screen.

In both cases, test real text. The Font Tester shows your own line in every Tat Khalsa font at the size you choose, so you can compare them with the same words rather than with a sample sentence.

This is the decision that catches most people out. Tat Khalsa fonts, like most classic Gurmukhi display fonts, are Gurbani Akhar encoded: they expect English letters and draw Gurmukhi from them. Fonts that come with your phone or computer, and Google fonts such as Noto Sans Gurmukhi, Noto Serif Gurmukhi, Anek Gurmukhi, Baloo Paaji 2 and Mukta Mahee, are Unicode: they expect real Gurmukhi characters.

Choose by destination:

• Website, app, social media, chat, email: Unicode. The reader's device chooses the font, so your choice only sets the fallback. Use a Unicode font and pair it with a system stack.
• Poster, invitation, PDF, video title, image: either. You control the font, so a Gurbani Akhar face is fine. Convert your text with the Punjabi Unicode Converter and apply the font.

The Gurbani Akhar vs Unicode guide goes into the detail.

Most Punjabi design is bilingual, and the two scripts need to feel balanced. A few rules of thumb:

• Match the texture, not the category. A modern Gurmukhi sans sits well beside a humanist Latin sans; a handwritten Gurmukhi face pairs with a quiet Latin serif rather than a Latin script face, which would compete with it.
• Gurmukhi often looks smaller than Latin at the same point size because of the headline. Set the Gurmukhi one or two points larger, or reduce the Latin.
• Give Gurmukhi more line height. Vowel signs above and below the letters need room; 1.6 to 1.8 is comfortable where Latin would use 1.5.
• Avoid tight letter spacing on handwritten and manuscript faces. Their charm depends on the gaps.

All three Tat Khalsa fonts are free to download and use, and the licence is included in each download. Install the .ttf or .otf for desktop work and use the .woff2 on websites; the install guide walks through each device. When you share a design file, embed the fonts or export to PDF, otherwise the Gurmukhi will fall back to whatever the recipient has installed.