Asar

Try Asar

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Asar Regular

About Asar

Asar is a serif typeface that sets the Devanagari and Latin scripts in a single style. Its outlines come from an expanding brush stroke that follows the centre line of each letter, which gives the Latin in the specimen soft, swelling strokes, rounded serif ends and a gentle diagonal stress. The official notes say the design is meant to work in long texts while keeping some charm at large sizes, and that it is partly derived from Palanquin by Pria Ravichandran, whose proportions, glyph set and OpenType features served as a starting point before the brush dictated wider spacing and new forms. Asar has one Regular style, with no bold or italic, and is not a variable font. It holds 1,336 glyphs covering Devanagari, Latin and Latin Extended. Sorkin Type leads the project, and the license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Asar works

Long reading in Devanagari script

The notes name long texts as the goal, and the 1,336 glyphs hold the Devanagari character set alongside Latin.

Bilingual pages

Devanagari and Latin were drawn with the same brush model, so both scripts share stroke rhythm on one page.

Headings with a brushed texture

At large sizes the swelling strokes and rounded serif ends become the visible character of a title.

Literary and cultural publications

A soft, calligraphic serif suits poetry, essays and programme notes set in one weight.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Devanagari. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: devanagari, latin, latin-ext. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Asar

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Asar on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Asar";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Asar-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Asar", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Asar with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Asar&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

One weight

Asar has Regular 400 only, so emphasis needs size, colour or a companion family.

Derived in part from Palanquin

According to the official notes, Asar began from Palanquin's proportions, glyph set and OpenType features, then diverged.

Many unencoded glyphs

The font has 1,336 glyphs for 572 encoded characters.

FAQs

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All serif fonts