Noto Sans Syriac Western

Serṭā is the Western way of writing Syriac, and this family draws it with no stroke contrast at all, in the unmodulated style Google files under sans serif. For a script that most readers meet in church books, that is an unusual choice, and a good fit for a phone screen.

Every form of Syriac is an abjad read from right to left, and the record of the script goes back to 6 CE. Besides Syriac proper, people wrote Aramaic, Neo-Aramaic and Turoyo (Surayt) in it, though most of what gets read in it now is read in the Syrian church.

Joining is where things go wrong. The text engine has to shape each word, with the font’s contextual alternates and localized forms doing the swaps, and an app with no complex layout support leaves the letters standing apart.

9 weights come in the download, Thin at 100 through Black at 900. Would a liturgy ever need Black? Probably not, but a parish poster or the heading of a community site could, and the Thin covers the opposite case. Latin letters come with it too, so figures and a line of English can stay in the same font.