Filmmaker digitally revives old Kannada typeface used by Rev. Kittel

Bengaluru

A documentary filmmaker working on a film on Rev. Ferdinand Kittel, an indologist famous for working on the first Kannada dictionary, got fascinated with typefaces of the books he published in the 19th Century and has now digitally recreated one of those fonts for Kannada. Named the Kittel font, it will be released on an open source platform. 

Filmmaker Prashanth Pandit embarked on research for his film on Rev. Kittel in 2020, but the COVID-19 lockdown derailed his works. “As part of my research, I visited the Balmatta Institute of Printing Technology, where the Basel Mission Press, the first printing press of the region where Rev. Kittel did his pioneering work, once stood. There are several century old printing machines, foundry and typefaces lying there, which fascinated me and I thought it would be nice if these fonts which are aesthetically very pleasing were available digitally today,” Mr. Pandit explained the genesis of the project. 

He soon collected a host of books published by Basel Mission Press, which included several theological works, Kannada textbooks, dictionaries, pamphlets among other works from the 1860s to 1925 and was fascinated by the varied typefaces during this period. Mr. Pandit, who has a background in Indic computing, soon got together with two of his friends and took to digitally recreating one of the fonts. 

“We had to find all the letters of the Kannada alphabet with all its kagunita in these books, scan each of them and then recreate them digitally. We wouldn’t find all the letters in one book. So we searched and scanned many books to create a corpus of all possible letters, following which we recreated the font,” Mr. Pandit explained. 

The Kittel font, that will be released on Sunday, is just one of the fonts used during the 1860-1925 period. Sanchi, a collective working for documentation of Kannada heritage in the digital space, has now taken up the project to revive other fonts. “We have now pooled up over 2,000 books from the period and are studying them to learn how Kannada typefaces have changed during the period. We have documented them and selected a few fonts to be revived digitally,” said Om Shivaprakash of Sanchi.