An in-depth overview of Tibetan typography, tracing the script’s origins, structure and stylistic traditions, and following its transformation from early calligraphy and woodblock printing through metal type, missionary presses, and into contemporary digital type design.

About the exact origins of the Tibetan script, little is known. The foundations of its writing system are associated with King Songtsen Gampo, who reformed Tibet during his reign, which lasted from 620 to 645 CE. Other sources, however, suggest that the script may have found its way into Tibet through Kashmir or Chinese Turkistan.

Dbu-can (also known as Uchen) is the formal, upright, and block-style script of the Tibetan language, characterized by having a distinct horizontal line along the top of most characters. It is the standard script used in manuscripts and publishing. See more samples of Dbu-can above.

Dbu-med (meaning ‘headless’), on the other hand, is a cursive, more rounded, handwritten script, and although it is derived from the dbu-can script, it does not have this headline characteristic. This more informal script evolved into at least ten different calligraphic styles and was used primarily for personal correspondence and artistic applications. From the seventh century onwards, the Tibetan writing system remained standardised and has changed very little since.

Tibetan syllables are separated by a tsheg, and as many Tibetan words are monosyllabic, this wedge-shaped (or sometimes circular) punctuation mark often functions almost as a space, since word spacing is not applied in Tibetan orthography. The end of a sentence, on the other hand, is indicated with a vertical stroke (shad). Tibetan orthography does not use capitalisation, and it has its own distinct numerals. While Tibetan typography does not use various weights in the way roman, bold or italic might be used, some mid- and late-20th-century publications of Tibetan books manufactured in China reveal that a bold weight was used for emphasis. The Tibetan script and numbers are also used in Bhutan for writing Dzongkha.

Several letters can be combined within a single syllable, either horizontally (left, right) or vertically (top, bottom), or both. In the vertical direction, you can add an ‘elicited’ letter above the root letter, and/or an ‘underlined’ letter below it. Horizontally, the root letter can be preceded by a ‘prefixed’ letter or followed by a ‘suffixed’ letter, which in turn can be followed by a second suffixed letter. In this way, up to three consonants can be superimposed vertically (root letter in the middle + one letter on top + one letter underneath), and four letters aligned horizontally. The vowel sign can always be added. The number of elements making up a syllable thus ranges from one (the single root letter) to eight (seven consonant elements and one vowel), and sometimes a little more for some borrowed terms, notably from Sanskrit, Chinese and other languages.

The Tibetan typefaces mentioned in this section were usually cut and cast in Western countries, with some exceptions. Although movable type existed in China, and a kind of wooden movable type had been employed in early Tibetan xylographs, the technique of printing with metal sorts was not actually applied within Tibet or Bhutan. Instead, Western missionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries exported their knowledge of the Tibetan language and writing system to their respective countries, where Tibetan typefaces were cut in order to print dictionaries, grammar books or religious texts, all of which aided the missionaries in their work. These publications were also used by Western scholars, and from the 1970s, schoolbooks and other printed publications were also intended to be used by the Tibetans themselves.

The earliest European reproductions of the Tibetan script by letterpress printing are found in publications related to missionary work — translations of the bible and other religious literature. In the process of translating these texts, missionaries studied the different writing systems of the countries in which they were stationed and created vocabularies, dictionaries and grammar books to facilitate their work. For example, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide Press in Rome issued alphabetums of the various ‘alphabets’ their missionaries had studied, thus producing the earliest works on the Tibetan language and its writing systems that were printed with movable metal type. A catalogue from 1773 — which groups most of these published grammars — and other books printed at the Propaganda Fide Press can be consulted at the British Library.

The same Roman press was the first to print the Tibetan script with movable type, in its publication Alphabetum tibetanum missionum apostolicarum commodo editum of 1759. This quarto volume was written by Agostino [Augusto] Antonio Giorgi, an Augustine Eremite from Ravenna and a friend of Costantino Ruggieri, the then director of the Propaganda Fide Press. It described not only the Tibetan language, but also the customs and religion of the people. Funded by the Spanish Cardinal Belluga, a Tibetan fount was made especially for this work. Its punches had been cut 20 years earlier, in 1738, by Antonio Fantauzzi, who based his design of the Tibetan characters upon the drawings of Francesco Oliverio Orazio (1680–1745), a Capucin monk from Penna di Billi of the Pesaro province in Italy. This Christian missionary had travelled to Tibet in 1716 and settled in Lhasa, where he collaborated with Buddhist and Lamaist scholars in India and China for more than 15 years. Then, in 1738, Orazio travelled back to Tibet — the same year Fantauzzi modelled the punches of the Tibetan type for the Propaganda Fide Press upon Orazio’s hand:

Alphabetum Tangutanum sive Tibetanum, 1773

Tibetan punch of Fantauzzi Tibetan-type at the Imprimerie Nationale.

Giambattista Bodoni of Parma (1740–1813) was the first person to cut a Tibetan typeface in two sizes, evidenced by his Manuale Tipografico of 1818, which presents two different sizes of a Tibetan fount. Both printing types are called Tibetane. The larger size, Sul Testo, is cast on an 18pt body and thus refers to the equivalent of the Great Primer. The smaller one, Sulla Filosofia, is cast on an 11pt body and is the equivalent of Small Pica. It is no surprise that the Tibetan characters of these two founts bear a striking resemblance to the Fantauzzi typeface, since Bodoni in fact trained as a typographer and printer at the Propaganda Fide Press in Rome between 1758 and 1766. Later, in 1806, he used his Tibetan printing types to typeset the Tibetan translation of the Lord’s Prayer in his Oratio Dominica.

In 1826, the missionaries William Carey (1761–1834) and John Clark Marshman (1794–1877) edited a dictionary and grammar of the ‘Bhotanta, or Boutan language’, with the intention of extending the circulation of the Serampore missionary publications. A dedicated fount of Tibetan types was cut and cast for this project, probably by the Indian punchcutter Manohar Karmakar, son-in-law and apprentice of Panchanan Karmakar, the famous Bengali type-cutter — though unfortunately he did not make use of any original Tibetan calligraphic examples or xylographic prints as a model for his Tibetan punches and instead decided to produce a recut of the Fantauzzi type in a smaller size.

Around the same time, a new Tibetan typeface design was being developed by the Hungarian philologist Sándor Kőrösi Csoma (Alexander Csoma de Kőrös) (1784–1842). It was cut in three different type sizes in order to print his Tibetan dictionary and grammar book in 1834, and the Csoma type was used in publications printed by the Baptist Mission Press in Calcutta until the 1950s.

France, which had already cultivated a century-old interest in oriental studies, followed in Russia’s footsteps by cutting new Tibetan types. The Imprimerie Nationale employed the renowned and skilled punchcutter Marcellin Legrand (dates unknown) to cut a Tibetan typeface in two sizes, the first being the tibétain corps 18 in 1839, as presented in Spécimen des types divers de l’Imprimerie Nationale (1878). The same type specimen also displays Legrand’s tibétain corps 15, which was created later, in 1841. Legrand’s Tibetan types were among more than 20 typefaces he cut for various writing systems of the world during the 27 years he worked for the foundry.

Tibetan case layout of the Imprimerie Nationale, Marcellin Legrand, 1841

In 1844, German scholar, Friedrich Ballhorn (1803–1876) published the second edition of his Alphabete orientalischer und occidentalischer Sprachen zum Gebrauch für Schriftsetzer und Correctoren, which contained 32 different scripts. In the Tibetan syllabary, Ballhorn sets out the 30 Tibetan base characters in a table together with their German transliteration. The Tibetan characters are typeset in a fount of a heavy weight and are cut on a large body. Each one has a strong contrast in the stroke modulation: the thick strokes are executed as bold lines, whereas the thin parts of the characters are designed as fine hairlines. These features, together with the large base-character height of the typeface, give it a display fount function, rather than fitting the purpose of a textface. This Tibetan display typeface was cut by the German punchcutter Gustav Schelter (1815–1888).

The Kaiserlich und Königlichen Hof- und Staatsdruckerei in Vienna was a big competitor for the British and French royal printers. Under the printer and inventor Alois Auer (1813–1869), three different sizes of Tibetan type were executed, all dated 1850, in 12pt, 16pt and 24pt. Unfortunately the K.K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei was bombed during the Second World War and most of its printing material, equipment and archives were destroyed.

Around the 1880s, a typeface with a similar design, influenced by the types of Vienna, was produced in Britain by Stephen Austin & Sons of Hertford. Although their Tibetan typeface was not fully used by their compositors until 1918, it was shown in their first type specimen book, issued around 1880. It was specifically used to typeset the Tibetan texts of the articles that were published in the volumes of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Stephen Austin & Sons’ type specimen of 1953 reveals that the foundry had also created a second size of Tibetan type on a 17pt body. A large collection of world script printing types from Stephen Austin & Sons is currently housed in the British Library in London, including the two sizes of their Tibetan typeface.

Tibetan punches from Reichsdruckerei Berlin in the collection of the Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin

Tibetan section in the Catalogue of the Imperial printing office of the German empire in Berlin for the World’s Exposition in St Louis, 1904

Tibetan dictionary compiled by Jäschke for the Berlin Academy of Sciences, 1881

Ferdinand Theinhardt’s Tibetan matrices from the Wilhelm Eduard Drugulin collection in Leipzig.

The sorts of OUP’s Tibetan are now located at the St Bride Library in London, having been transferred there from Oxford University Press between 1983 and 1989, following the closure of the latter’s letterpress workshop. In total, there were 170 cases and 950 packets of printing type dating from the 17th to the 20th centuries, mostly cast at Oxford for printing Western and ‘oriental’ languages, including those known as the ‘Fell’ types.

From a typographical point of view, Theinhardt succeeded in translating the characteristics of Tibetan handwriting into elegantly executed and well-proportioned metal typeforms. Without mirroring previous models of Tibetan printing types, his original design was a true reflection of the Tibetan script, and it went on to exert both direct and indirect influence on other type foundries and printers. Theinhardt’s work was met with great approval, and his Tibetan fount was soon being distributed to printing houses all over the world. It became the standard typeface for printing Tibetan text up to the advent of the personal computer.

Tibetan in Musterbuch, Theinhardt, 1895

The Industrial Revolution, particularly at the end of the 19th century, also affected the typefounding and printing world in Europe and America. Although new mechanical typesetting — and later phototypesetting — manufacturers like Linotype, Intertype, Monotype and Lumitype catered for a large diversity of the world’s writing systems, none of them ever produced a Tibetan fount. Whatever the reasons for this, the compositors of the printing houses who were using Tibetan types were familiar with handling the Tibetan sorts and continued to use hand-set Tibetan type until the advent of the early digital Tibetan fonts.

One machine, however, brought the typesetting of Tibetan out of the compositor’s room at the printing house and onto the private desk of the office, half a century before the launch of the digital desktop computer. This machine was known as the VariTyper, and although composing Tibetan on this machine was never particularly popular, two other desktop devices did become more frequently used by those who were producing typewritten Tibetan texts from their offices, as an alternative to having the works printed by printing houses. The first Tibetan typewriter was the machine used at the University of Hamburg by Professor Dr Michael Hahn, Tibetologist and scholar in the Tibetan language. The second Tibetan typewriter was used mainly at the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, in Dharamsala (McCleodganj, India). These machines were mainly used to produce text- and grammar books on the Tibetan languages. Further research is currently being undertaken by the author into other Tibetan typewriters that were developed in other regions of the world.

At the beginning of the 20th century, two new linguistic publications became standard works for scholars of the Tibetan language. The Dictionary of the Tibetan Language and Sanskrit Synonyms (1902) and the Introduction to the Grammar of the Tibetan Language (1915) were both prepared by the Indian scholar Sarat Chandra Das (1849–1917). The Bengal Secretariat Press printed a thousand copies of Das’s Dictionary and introduced to the public the first family of three new Tibetan printing types, all of which share the same stylistic features, despite having been individually cut and cast on different type sizes.

While the manufacture of Tibetan printing types originated in Europe and north-east India, Tibetan founts also started to emerge in China from the second half of the 20th century. When Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976) took over the leadership of China in 1949 and renamed it the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC), his political philosophies were to reform the country into a world power. The printing industry went on to expand considerably in the PRC.

From 1951 onwards, Mao had the words of his regime’s ideology published in five volumes as the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, which became widely distributed in China, making it one of the most printed books in history. The Tibetan translations of Mao’s publications were printed by the Foreign Languages Press (FLP), and in this booklet the Tibetan typeface used to set the large quantities of bodytext bears some resemblance to Theinhardt’s Tibetan in terms of the proportion and stroke treatment in the characters, though it clearly has a more monolinear feel with regard to its colour. A large-size Tibetan typeface is used to set the chapter titles, as well as for some of the quotations for emphasis. However, it was not until 1966 that the FLP introduced the first ‘true’ bold weight of a Tibetan fount. This heavy typeface with a strong stroke modulation is characterised by very specific features: the height of the base characters appears very small in proportion to their width. This typographic style, of using a secondary weight to emphasise parts of the text, was borrowed from Western book design and came into practice in China after the introduction of Western printing techniques in the PRC during Mao’s reign.

Although the FLP was the main printer of government publications in languages other than Chinese, its types were also used by presses outside the FLP’s own printing office. One of the two smaller Tibetan printing types was also used outside Beijing — appearing in the 1983 type specimen book of the Shanghai-based 605 Wen Zi Factory.

The Tibetan typefaces of Mao Tse-tung’s publications can be regarded as the Tibetan typefaces of the Chinese government. They became the model of the first Tibetan typefaces for phototypesetting, and the first Tibetan digital fonts that were manufactured in the PRC. The majority of contemporary Tibetan publications of the PRC continue to be designed with Tibetan typefaces that resemble the style of the Mao founts.

When the first Apple Macintosh desktop computer and the first IBM laser printer became available in the mid 1980s, many new Tibetan fonts started to appear. Most, if not all, of these digital fonts were developed to work with the new software applications that were created to process Tibetan texts.

It is promising that during the past two decades, professional typeface design courses at universities, academies and art schools around the world have been paying greater attention to developing typefaces for a variety of world scripts, including Tibetan and those for minority languages which have smaller numbers of users. These courses often offer the next generation of typeface designers much needed resources, as well as the teaching, research, design and technological experience of their tutors, and give these designers the opportunity and time to reflect on how to develop fonts for contemporary practice.

• De Baerdemaeker, Jo. 2020. Tibetan Typeforms. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij De Buitenkant
• Noordzij, Gerrit. 1986. Zetten bij Thieme, Nijmegen. Nijmegen: Thieme
• Schubert, Johannes. 1950. ‘Typographia Tibetana’ in Gutenberg Jahrbuch Festschrift: pp. 280–295
• Tracy, Walter. 1986. Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design. London: Gordon Fraser
• Updike, Daniel Berkeley. 1963. Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Use. Third edition, volume 1. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

All images courtesy of Jo De Baerdemaeker