Resources / specimens for Mongolian script typefaces?

ishtar van looy

Hi all!
I've been looking for some resources or specimens that could help me in my effort to draw a typeface in the traditional Mongolian script — not Cyrillic! — as the few bits and pieces I could find are either very low quality images, or all seem to be set in the same typeface, which I can't seem to find anyway. Any help would be much appreciated! thanks all — ishtar

Florian Hardwig

Have you been in touch with Jo De Baerdemaeker? He runs a research project titled Mongolian script: from metal type to digital font.

Paul Hanslow

Not exactly a resource, but @Toshi Omagari designed Mongolian for his Marco typeface during his studies in Reading's Masters of Type Design program (MATD). However, I don't believe it was every released. My reason for mentioning this is Toshi used Glyphs when designing Marco and detailed some of the issues which aorse from designing a vertical script in software that typically tackles horizontal (ie Latin, Cyrillic etc).

He might be worth contacting due to his strong technical/design background in type design. 

John Hudson

It’s worth noting that the Unicode encoding model of Mongolian and the downstream shaping model are both subjects of ongoing contention and discussion. I last looked at this a few years, when @Aaron Bell and I were working on a Mongolian project for Microsoft, and the conclusion we came to is that the current model doesn’t really work and that the requirements on the font side exceed what OpenType Layout was designed to do.

Aaron Bell

Like @John said, the technical implementation of Mongolian is not very straightforward. The Unicode codepoint implementation does not capture the actual function of the language, so extensive OpenType work is necessary. Back when I started at Microsoft (over a decade ago!), I worked to try and resolve issues with the existing Mongolian Baiti font and in the process create an example font that could be used by others to create their own Traditional Mongolian fonts. However, due to the complexity of the problem and differing opinions about how to implement among the various stakeholders, my understanding is that the work is still ongoing.

This isn't to say that one shouldn't attempt a Mongolian font, but it is worth noting that the shaping discussions are still underway, so how things tend to be done today may change in the future.

@lianghai has been quite active in the discussions with Unicode and could best advise.

Some resources that you might find useful:

http://www.mongolfont.com/en/font/index.html

https://twitter.com/tengistype

https://www.behance.net/tengis-khasbagana

There's also a lot of links here, though I don't know how useful they are:

http://luc.devroye.org/mongolian-index.html

John Hudson

I’ve been trying to think of a simile to characterise the nature of the problem of the Unicode encoding of Mongolian—and subsequent font layout implementation issues—to people unfamiliar with the script. Imagine if, instead of users typing ‘le’ or ‘la’ in French, fonts were expected to work out the gender of a noun based on glyph context alone.

Hin-Tak Leung

This? A few years ago I crossed path with this guy, who claimed to be an expert in this area:
https://github.com/lianghai/mongolian