BabelStone Tibetan sMar-chen

To complement my post on Zhang Zhung scripts I have created an experimental OpenType Unicode font for the block style of sMar-chen script that is shown in Yig gzugs du ma'i ma phyi gzhon nu mdzes pa'i lang tsho ཡིག་གཟུགས་དུ་མའི་མ་ཕྱི་གཞོན་ནུ་མཛེས་པའི་ལང་ཚོ (1994) pages 7-9. I choose this script and style as sMar-chen is my favourite Zhang Zhung script, and the block style seemed to be the easiest to create glyphs for. This font, called BabelStone Tibetan sMar-chen, may be downloaded for free from the the BabelStone Fonts blog.

I have named the font "BabelStone Tibetan sMar-chen" because it is mapped to the Tibetan block. If one day sMar-chen and other Zhang Zhung scripts are encoded in Unicode I will remap the glyphs and rename the font.

Tibetan text in this font should render correctly on systems that support Tibetan shaping such as Microsoft Vista. However, at present the font only fully supports native Tibetan stacks, and has only limited support for Sanskrit conjuncts (I don't know how necessary it is to support complex stacks for Zhang Zhung texts). Also, because of the limited sample of sMar-chen script available to me there are a number of unanswered questions about the sMar-chen script (e.g. does it use a tsheg mark ? How is a "u" vowel sign joined to a letter with no righthand stem ?), and so in places I have had to guess how certain complex glyphs should look, often with less than satisfactory results. Hopefully I will be able to improve the font in the future when I get more scripts samples study.

The following shows a page from the model used for the "BabelStone Tibetan sMar-chen" font, together with a screenshot of the same text rendered on my system using "BabelStone Tibetan sMar-chen" at 20 points. The original Tibetan text for the screenshot is shown below that, and if you have "BabelStone Tibetan sMar-chen" installed on your system and your system supports Tibetan properly, then the text should appear the same as in the screen shot.

རྐྱ རྒྱ རྨྱ། སྐྱ སྒྱ སྤྱ སྦྱ སྨྱ། སྐྲ སྒྲ སྣྲ སྤྲ སྦྲ སྨྲ། ལེགས།

བཅིངས བསྒྲིགས ཨ ཨཱོྃ ཧཱུཾ རཾ ཛ། གཡུང དྲུང མགུལ

བཀྲ ཤིས བདེ ལེགས ཕུན སུམ ཚོགས པར ཤོག །

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Addendum [2007-06-02]

Chris Hatchell has sent me some photos of inscriptions in the sMar-chen script on a temple and library at the gYong-drung Bon Monastery in Dolanji (Himachal Pradesh), which he has kindly agreed to let me put in this post.

Inscription on Library

Inscription on Temple

The style of script used on the temple inscription is exactly the same as the style of my sMar-chen font :

༄། ཨཱོྃནམཨདཀརས...