The Need of a Digital Typeface for Assamese Script

India is a land of vast diversity, a home to hundreds of communities and languages. In the northeast of India lies Assam. Even with the existence of multiple tribes and languages in Assam, Assamese is considered as the official language with more than 15 million speakers and serves as lingua franca of the region. Though there are differences in spoken medium, the script for Assamese language is very similar to that of Bengali script, historically there were certain differences in the former scripts but the ones which are being used now are the same except the character ‘ ’ (ra) and ‘ ’ (wa), which is missing in Bengali script. However, there are not a lot of Assamese Unicode typefaces available on the internet. Even among the available ones most of them have been designed for print mediums like newspapers or magazines. This paper is aimed to understand different guidelines important for designing a digital typeface by reviewing existing literature and to design a new Assamese typeface suitable for screen based applications. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG