Andika (typeface)

Andika (/ænˈdiːkə/, from the verb root for 'to write' in Swahili) is a sans-serif typeface developed by SIL International for the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. It is designed for literacy programs and beginning readers, but also has support for IPA transcription and a large number of diacritics. The font offers four family members: roman, bold, italic and bold italic.

Andika supports OpenType and AAT technologies for advanced rendering features. It is licensed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL),^[1] and can be downloaded free of charge.^[2]

Version 6.2 of the font includes over 3,800 glyphs, including stylistic variants and ligatures.^[3] Stylistic variants include alternate forms of letters such as a, g and t and the digit 4. The Andika New Basic variant has a reduced number of characters and a significantly smaller file size.

Variant forms of many characters can be chosen in supporting word-processors. For example, in LibreOffice, for double-story a and double-story g, append ss01=1 to the name of the font in the font-selection window.^[4] (Features are appended with a colon and linked with an ampersand.) Alternatively, customized versions of the fonts can be created with TypeTuner, prior to download, that have those forms preset.^[5] Features that may be chosen include double-story 'a', double-story 'g', open-top '4', barred '7', 'i' and 'l' with a bottom curl, variant forms of capital 'Ŋ', capital 'Q' with a crossing tail, straight-stem 't', 'y' with a straight tail, Vietnamese-style diacritics, Serbian-style italics in Cyrillic, staveless tone letters, slashed zero, and automatic fractions.^[4]