Font guidelines for sitelen pona

This is an essay. It may argue a specific position or include original research.

This collection of font guidelines for sitelen pona is based on experiences with creating and reading various fonts. It has taken time for best practices to develop around sitelen pona typography and penmanship, and while many fonts are being created and improved, not all are considered ideal.

The less technical advice may also be of use for improving handwriting.

Construction

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Monospaced fonts are generally more legible than proportional fonts. A consistent distance between each glyph makes it faster to find the center of each glyph, and giving narrower glyphs more padding makes it easier to identify each glyph by silhouette. The width of each character should be the same, even if the glyph doesn't visually occupy the whole space. In fonts that also cover narrow writing systems such as the Latin script, sitelen pona is generally treated as wide, much like CJK typography.

sitelen pona is typically written centered around a midline, rather than a baseline. Each glyph should be centered within its space on both axes.

As a corollary to both points, a glyph does not need to fill the entire width or height of its bounding box. This is most obvious with lili (lili), but also applies to any glyph with a horizontal or vertical aspect ratio, such as the pronoun glyphs (misinaona). Even glyphs with a square aspect ratio can be given visual padding so that they look balanced in size with other glyphs.

It is largely recommended to base glyph proportions on jan Sonja's handwriting in Toki Pona: The Language of Good, as most glyphs are easiest to recognize in that state. See Comparison of jan Sonja's handwriting and linja pona for several common examples of divergent proportions.

Minimum viable feature set

Font creators and users will have different standards for when to consider a font complete. Most users will probably consider a font usable when it has the following features:

Encoding

• UCSUR-compliant codepoint assignment. This makes the font compatible with established sitelen pona input methods such as Ajemi.

Repertoire

Words

• All nimi pu (words found in Toki Pona: The Language of Good)
• All nimi ku suli (words above a specific usage threshold in Toki Pona Dictionary). Refer also to § Glyphs for words with multiple proposed glyphs.

Punctuation and extensions

• Cartouche start, end, and extension lines
• Long pi start, and low extension line for all extended glyphs
• Middle dot and colon. Aside from their use as sentence separators, nasin sitelen kalama uses them inside cartouches.

Ligatures

• Cartouches and low extension lines should work with any glyph without any gaps between the lines. This can be achieved either by making new glyphs where each sitelen pona character is combined with extension lines, or by creating zero-width extension and cartouche lines that can be used after a word to reach under another character.
• Ideally, these should work without adding a control character for the lines each time—instead, through contextual ligatures, lines get filled automatically between a start and end character. jan Lepeka has example templates for this feature.
• ASCII transcription: For increased accessibility, use lookup tables^{[clarification needed]} to add ligatures for glyphs, punctuation marks, and any other features, so that users can write with the font without an input method. For example, toki typed out in sitelen Lasina would automatically display as toki in the font.

Optional features

The following features require a lot of work, so they tend not to be seen as a marker of completion but are appreciated where present.

• Small glyphs for scaled and stacked combined glyphs
• Implementing glyph combination itself. While this may be achievable by merging characters, this would result in a big font file and a lot of work. Instead, making components all align with each other is generally a better option. Consider which kinds of combinations work with which kinds of characters in the first place.

Some users also find the following features useful:

• Japanese-style quotation marks. These are also used as glyphs for experimental quotative particles, te and to, whose names the ligatures should use.
• An extended a character that connects to the extension line, for elongated forms equivalent to sitelen Lasina "aaa"
• Extended prepositions that connect to the extension line (most commonly tawa)

Glyphs

Common pitfalls

• seme should not be differentiated from a question mark. See sitelen pona § Question marks.
• Up-arrow epiku is easy to confuse with directional ni.
• Flipped-sin majuna is easy to mix up with sin or namako, and lotus majuna is prettier.^{[citation needed…]}This claim needs references to reliable sources:
  Is this the majority opinion?
  (Sep 2024)
• Thick-stem soko is easy to confuse with mama.
• Making the circle massive in the pronouns (mi, sina, ona) and lape make them easier to confuse with each other.
• Adhering to the metaphors intended by pu glyphs,^{[clarification needed]} when possible, helps recognizability.

Flexible glyphs

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Many characters in sitelen pona are widely considered to not be static and aren't supposed to be drawn the same way every time.

• jaki: any scribble, usually with overlaps, such as jaki1 jaki2 jaki3 jaki4 jaki5 jaki6 jaki7 jaki8 jaki9 jaki10 jaki11jaki1 jaki2 jaki3 jaki4 jaki5 jaki6 jaki7 jaki8 jaki9 jaki10 jaki11
• ko: any blobby unshapely form, such as ko1 ko2 ko3 ko4 ko5 ko6ko1 ko2 ko3 ko4 ko5 ko6
• ni: many use ni to point to the part ni is referencing (up, down, right, or other directions, instead of the standard downwards arrow) like so: ni> ni< ni^ nivni> ni< ni^ niv
• ni: often the line is extended if it's been rotated to the left or right, such as ni>(--)ni>(--)
• lete, kin: rotation, and maybe even exact number of intersecting lines, aren't important
• linja, kon, telo, pakala, mun: can be mirrored
• soweli: the exact amount of legs might be less important
• ku: the toki pona symbol can range from a simple dot to full-fidelity

Alternative glyphs

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For various different reasons, people have made new glyphs of different characters. The Esperanto translation of pu, Tokipono: La lingvo de bono, includes drawings of these:

• sewi: mirrored glyph of anpa (not very common, but listed by Toki Pona Dictionary—alternatively, it has been suggested elsewhere to use other religious symbols, with the possible downside of being less legible)
• akesi: 2 pairs of legs instead of 3
• namako: both sin with an extra line below, and a hot pepper with emanating lines above, are featured side-by-side
• Additionally, 4 different drawings of jaki are included

Other common-ish variations include:

• kala: adding 2 dots for eyes
• epiku, kokosila, lanpan: although there is a more widely accepted version for all of these, their glyphs are relatively recent and have had more than one shape, so older versions are still in use

See also

• Text formatting in sitelen pona