| Andika | |
| Style: | Sans-serif |
| Releasedate: | 2008 |
| Commissioned By: | SIL International |
| License: | SIL Open Font License |
| Creator: | Victor Gaultney |
| Variations: | Andika, Andika Compact, Andika New Basic, |
Andika (from the verb root for 'to write' in Swahili) is a sans-serif typeface developed by SIL International for the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. It is designed for literacy programs and beginning readers, but also has support for IPA transcription and a large number of diacritics. The font offers four family members: roman, bold, italic and bold italic.
Andika supports OpenType and AAT technologies for advanced rendering features. It is licensed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL),[1] and can be downloaded free of charge.[2]
Version 6.2 of the font includes over 3,800 glyphs, including stylistic variants and ligatures.[3] Stylistic variants include primer-style forms of letters such as a, g and t and the digit 4. The Andika New Basic variant has a reduced number of characters and a significantly smaller file size.
Variant forms of many characters can be chosen in the word-processor. For example, for non-primer-style 'a' and 'g', append ss01=1 to the name of the font in the font-selection window. (Features are appended with a colon and linked with an ampersand.) Alternatively, customized versions of the fonts can be created with TypeTuner, prior to download, that have those forms preset.[4] Features that may be chosen include two-storey 'a', loop-tail 'g', open-top '4', barred '7', 'i' and 'l' with a bottom curl, variant forms of capital 'Ŋ', capital 'Q' with a crossing tail, primer-style 't', 'y' with a straight tail, Vietnamese-style diacritics, Serbian-style italics in Cyrillic, staveless tone letters, slashed zero and automatic fractions.[5]