The Kurinto Font Folio

Kurinto is a large collection of free fonts that include most of the characters in every human language. Academic publishing is an ideal use, especially if you use Microsoft Word to publish PDF documents or include text in non-European languages.

Kurinto fonts address many publishing pitfalls: costly fonts with publishing restrictions, irregular line heights, random font changes, enormous PDF file sizes, missing characters (such as □□□, ���, or 􏼉􏼉􏼉), spurious layout changes, and font format incompatibility. These roadblocks prevent many authors from creating presentable (or even usable) PDF files.

Kurinto helps authors publish their work without studying font technology or using advanced typographic techniques.

Open Source

Kurinto is and always will be free. The fonts are available to anyone at no charge, and is licensed under the SIL Open Font License Version 1.1. Kurinto fonts may be used, studied, copied, merged, modified and redistributed.

You may download and embed these fonts in digital documents, use them in commercial projects (including mobile apps), and bundle them (with or without modification) for redistribution under the terms of the SIL Open Font License Version 1.1.

Getting Started

Here are some starting points:

• Download one of the release packages, install the fonts, and start putting them to use,

• Check out the Quick Start Guide (which is pretty straightforward),
• Browse the extensive User's Guide,
• Look over the Specimen Book, which shows samples of all the typefaces.
• Head over to the Typefaces Page to get an overview and see some specimen pages, or
• Check out the current development status and discussions on the Kurinto GitHub page.

Motivation

The intent of the open-source approach is to foster a community of ongoing development and refinement. Kurinto was built on many instances of this open-source approach: Linux, Apache, Firefox, WordPress, BIND, LibreOffice, FontUtils, FontTools, and many (many) fonts released under licenses compatible with the OFL.

The more people that you have access to, the better the selection of ideas at your disposal, and the more you can recombine into something brand new. This is the key to cultural evolution.

Someone thinks of something. Someone else adapts it to a brand-new environment. Someone incrementally improves on it. Copying, recombining, and learning from each other.

This is what humans are good at. And this is the key to our intelligence.

— Michael Muthukrishna, London School of Economics
First Civilizations, S1, Ep3, 2018

Word Stack

The stack of words on the upper-right are transliterations of “Kurinto”. I used Google Translate for many of them and assembled others based on Unicode character titles. The word stack (as well as this web page) are set in Kuirnto Sans, with Kurinto Curv Bold used for the items in Maroon.

From top to bottom, the 31 languages and writing systems are: Lao, Hindi (Devanagari), Bengali (Bangla), Marathi (Devanagari), Punjabi (Gurmukhi), Korean (Hangul), Traditional Chinese (Han), Japanese (Katakana), Curvy2 (pseudo-alphabet from Unicode Toys), Bulgarian (Cyrillic), English/Romanji (Latin), Modern Greek, International Phonetic Alphabet, Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, Urdu (transliteration provided by Muhammad Imran), Amharic (Ethiopic / Ge'ez), Gujarati, Tengwar, Runes, Telugu, Kannada, Klingon, Georgian, Sinhala, Malayalam, Oriya, Braille, Ogham, and Tamil.