Andy | 30 June 2021

The SIL Writing Systems Technology Team announced today that there are new versions of the Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Gentium, and Andika fonts.  Many of us use one or more of these fonts.  They say:

Note that this is a major upgrade. This may cause document reflow as some glyphs widths have changed and some features have been removed. Please do not assume that you can replace version 5 with version 6 with no resulting changes to your publications.

A couple of other things to note:

  • They do not support Graphite.  They say, “Graphite has been removed. Application and OS support for OpenType has greatly improved, so the need for Graphite in this font family is greatly reduced. If this affects you, and you find that OpenType does not provide sufficient support for your needs, please contact us right away.”
  • Nine level tones are not supported.  They say, “Removed support for nine-level pitch contours. These will be replaced by a standalone pitch contours font in the future.”

We have not tried these out.  If you do, please let us know how they work for you with XLingPaper.

You can obtain them and see the information about them at these sites: