Chilanka
Designed By
SMC, Santhosh Thottingal
1 Style Handwriting
A little note,
before you go.
Chilanka · Regular
Try a short note, a name or a line of your own to compare the strokes and spacing.
1 style available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Chilanka ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
See you after the temple festival
A Note On The Page
Chilanka · Regular
A short letter, set in the family.
Thursday afternoon
Dear Alex,
I left the book by the window. There is a note on page twenty-three that I thought you would like. Bring it along on Thursday; we can finish the conversation over coffee.
See you there.
1 Style,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Regular400
See you after the temple festival
Chilanka is the Malayalam word for a musical anklet. The font is an everyday Malayalam hand, but it is nobody’s hand in particular: Santhosh Thottingal gathered many handwriting samples, picked a consistent set of forms from them and drew those, so the result looks like ordinary writing without copying one person.
The way it was made is unusual. Each letter began as a single center line drawn in Inkscape, no paper and no tracing, and FontForge then expanded the line with a round pen. That is why every stroke has the same width and round ends, as from a thin felt-tip or a ballpoint, and why there is not a sharp corner anywhere.
Work began in September 2014 and the first alpha appeared the next month. The glyph set covers most of the distinct Malayalam conjuncts, and a matching Latin came in 2016. Since the letters sit on a level baseline, Chilanka can carry a few paragraphs of body text as well as a comic panel or a wedding card.
Thottingal, a software engineer, works with Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, the free-software group behind the font, and also designed the Malayalam typeface Manjari.
Characters & Figures
370 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 364 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Chilanka
1 TTF style with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 166 KB ↓- Version
- 1.600
- License
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
Install On Your Computer
Extract the ZIP first. On Windows, select the font files and choose Install from the context menu. On macOS, open the files in Font Book and choose Install.
Use On A Website
Keep the font files and the included stylesheet together. Update the stylesheet path to match your project.
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="/fonts/chilanka/chilanka.css">
body {
font-family: 'Chilanka', cursive;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
Chilanka Heading · Inter Body
Thursday, Half Past Four
I left the book by the window. There is a note on page twenty-three that I thought you would like. Bring it along on Thursday; we can finish the conversation over coffee.