Aa Bb Cc 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
English, with the same pen
A school print, as children learn it: a one-storey a and g, round bowls, capitals as tall as the Tibetan head line. Kerned.
New · Yangtso 1.0
དབྱངས་མཚོ
Introducing Yangtso
A Tibetan typeface for children, written with one round pen. Tibetan and English together, three weights, 968 glyphs.
Font Designer Thupten Chakrishar Calligraphy Advisor Jamyang Dorjee Chakrishar Script Consultant Sonam Tsering Published by Terma Heritage Foundation
Why Tibetan type is hard
One syllable, stacked four high.
Tibetan builds each syllable upward and downward from its root letter. A Latin typeface gets by with a few hundred glyphs; a Tibetan one has to draw every stack so the letters touch, sit and balance, the way a calligrapher's hand would.
- 1 ག ga The root letter.
- 2 སྒ sga A letter on its head.
- 3 སྒྲ sgra A letter under its feet.
- 4 སྒྲུ sgru A vowel below that.
- 5 བསྒྲུབས bsgrubs One letter before and two after: one syllable.
Unicode and OpenType
Seven characters in, one syllable out.
Yangtso is fully Unicode-compliant and built with OpenType complex-script shaping. The text stays plain, standard Tibetan, the same characters you type, search, copy and save, and the font stacks each syllable as it is set: the superscript on top, the subjoined letters beneath, the vowel signs above and below, each on its anchor. It works the same in modern web browsers and on modern operating systems, with nothing to install but the font.
- U+0F56 ba
- U+0F66 sa
- U+0F92 ga, below
- U+0FB2 ra, below
- U+0F74 vowel u
- U+0F56 ba
- U+0F66 sa
968
glyphs in each weight
558
stacks and ligatures, each drawn as one shape
99.75%
of written Tibetan covered, measured on 134 million stacks of modern text
3
weights, one round pen
The family
Light, Regular, Bold.
The same round pen at three widths. Regular is the book weight; Light for large and airy pages; Bold for headings and the youngest readers.
བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས། Tashi Delek!
བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས། Tashi Delek!
བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས། Tashi Delek!
Try it
Type something. Make it cute.
Type Wylie and watch it turn Tibetan, or paste Tibetan, English and all. Three weights (Regular is the one to judge), any size, and a style to dress it up.
བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས།
Tibetan and English
Two scripts, one line.
Yangtso carries its own English, drawn with the same round pen and made to share a line with the Tibetan: the capitals rise exactly to the Tibetan head line, and both scripts keep one set of line metrics, so a sentence moves from one to the other with no mismatched baseline and no jump in the spacing. The icons a classroom needs and the signs of arithmetic come in the same pen.
★ ♥ ☺ ✏ ༣-༡=༢ · 3-1=2
Icons and sums
Icons on their standard codes and + − × ÷ =. A hyphen typed beside a digit is drawn as a minus.
༡ ༢ ༣ ༡+༢=༣ · 1+2=3
Tibetan figures
The ten Tibetan digits and the English figures, drawn with one pen, and the same sums in either script.
The letters
Every letter, and its name.
A learner meets the letter and its sound in one hand: the Tibetan on the front, its name in Yangtso’s English on the back. Hover or tap a letter to turn it over.
The whole set
968 glyphs, one round pen.
Every stack, every vowel, the digits and signs, the English and the icons: everything in Yangtso, read from the font itself. Hover or tap any one to see it large.
Details
What is in Yangtso, and what is not.
Yangtso covers everyday Tibetan and the common mantras, with English in the same pen. The numbers below describe exactly this version, review build v1.0 of 1 October 2026.
In the font
- The 30 consonants, the vowel signs, the digits, the punctuation and the common symbols of the Tibetan block.
- Every consonant stack and every vowel ligature of modern Tibetan: 540 two-, three-, four- and five-letter stacks, plus the positional forms of the subjoined letters. Measured against a corpus of modern Tibetan (news, opinion and Wikipedia: 69,880 documents, 68.8 million syllables, 134 million stacks), this set covers 99.75% of the stacks written.
- The glyphs of the common mantras and of the Sanskrit words a Tibetan reader meets outside the pecha: the retroflex letters (ṭa, ṭha, ḍa, ṇa, ṣa), the aspirates, the anusvāra and visarga, the long vowels, and 18 Sanskrit stacks.
- English, written with the same round pen: A to Z, a to z, 0 to 9 and the punctuation, with curly quotes, dashes, the ellipsis, the bullet and the degree sign. A school print, as children learn it: a one-storey a and g, an l with a tail, round bowls. The capitals and figures stand as tall as the Tibetan head line, so the two scripts sit together on one line. Kerned.
- Icons for children’s material on their standard codes (★ ✓ ☺ ♥ ✏ ⚽ ← ↑ → ↓ and more) and the signs of arithmetic, + − × ÷ =. A hyphen typed beside a digit is drawn as a minus (3-1=2, ༣-༡=༢); inside a word it stays a hyphen.
- 968 glyphs in all, of which 558 are precomposed stacks and ligatures; the rest are letters, marks, forms, digits, English and icons. Stacks form by OpenType substitution as you type; the vowel signs sit by anchors; side bearings and kerning are set letter by letter.
Left out, on purpose
Yangtso is not a Sanskrit-transliteration font: the rare stacks of the pecha’s apparatus are left out on purpose, so that every glyph in the font is one a reader of modern Tibetan actually meets.
The Sanskrit set: 572 stacks, long-vowel forms and signs used to write Sanskrit in Tibetan letters, such as ཀྵ, ཤྲཱ and ནཱ (766 glyphs with their alternate shapes). Yangtso does not draw them as shapes of their own; together they make up about 0.07% of the stacks in the same corpus of modern Tibetan, and 178 of them never occur in it at all. A text that uses them shows them built from separate letters and marks, and the few characters the font lacks (such as the subjoined ssa of ཀྵ) in another font.
Twenty religious signs of the Tibetan block, left out on purpose for a children’s font: U+0F15–0F18, 0F1E, 0F1F, 0F8A, 0FC2–0FC5, 0FC7–0FCC, 0FCF, 0FD5 and 0FD6. A text that uses them shows them in another font.
Weights
| Weight | stroke width, in units of 1000 | Sample |
|---|---|---|
| Light for large sizes and airy layouts | 65 | བོད་ཡིག |
| Regular the weight of a normal book face | 85 | བོད་ཡིག |
| Bold for headings and for the youngest readers | 95 | བོད་ཡིག |
Three weights, all one stroke. Regular is the weight of a normal book face; Light for large sizes and airy layouts; Bold for headings and for the youngest readers.
About this build
- TrueType outlines, not hinted. Vertical metrics from the tallest and deepest glyphs.
- Static fonts only: the three weights differ in outline structure and do not merge into a variable font. A weight axis is a later step.
- Not yet read as a book page at 12 to 16 px; judged at 40 px and above. A few counters of the densest stacks may close at small sizes in Bold.
New since review build v0.1
- English letters, figures and punctuation, written with the same pen and kerned.
- Icons for children’s material and the signs of arithmetic.
- The pen: the same round pen, its inside corners a little softer.
- Vowels above: the drengbu and the gigu stand on their syllable where they crowded the tsheg or reached past the letter.
- Twenty religious signs left out for a children’s font; U+0F36 added.
Known issues
- Seven signs (U+0F04, 0F05, 0F08 and 0F3A–0F3D) are provisional shapes under the pen; the designer’s own drawings of them will replace these.
- On the emoji codes (⚽ and the faces) some applications show their own colour emoji instead of Yangtso’s.
- Microsoft Word applies the kerning only when “Kerning for fonts” is ticked, and the hyphen-as-minus only with contextual alternates on; elsewhere both are on by default.
Made for
- Children’s books, primers and readers
- Classroom material and worksheets
- Large print
- Screens, at reading sizes and above
Format and licence
- Review files: TrueType (.ttf), three static weights. This site serves them as WOFF2.
- Unicode: fully compliant. Tibetan from the Tibetan block, English from Basic Latin; text set in Yangtso stays plain text you can search, copy and save.
- OpenType complex-script shaping for Tibetan: stacks by substitution, vowel signs by anchors, kerning. Works in modern web browsers and operating systems.
- Character set: everyday Tibetan and the common mantras, with English letters, figures and punctuation, classroom icons and the signs of arithmetic in the same pen.
- Licence: not yet released. The intention is a free, open licence once the fonts are ready.
Why we made it
For a child’s first book.
Six and a half million people speak Tibetan, and fifteen centuries of literature are written in it, yet only a handful of digital fonts exist, most of them tracings of hand-drawn letters from the 1990s: dense and intricate, made for monks and scholars, never for a child opening a first book.
Tibetans growing up abroad often speak the language but cannot read it, and when asked why, they say the same thing: the writing looked too hard. A rounder, warmer, simpler letter is the smallest thing that could change that. Yangtso is that letter.
It is engineered to the standard the world’s major scripts take for granted: plain Unicode text, OpenType shaping, its own English on the same line, at home on the phones, tablets and laptops children actually use. Fonts like it are carrying Tibetan typography into a strong, professional era.
When Yangtso is released it will be free, under an open licence, for everyone.
The people behind it
Made by hand, made with care.
Yangtso 1.0 is not released yet. Please look closely before it is.
This is review build v1.0, exported on 1 October 2026, and it is shared privately so that a few reviewers can look closely before release. The outlines are unhinted, the character set is deliberately limited, and anything you find can still change. Please do not use Yangtso in anything published yet.
- What helps most: letterforms that read wrong, stacks that sit wrong, vowel signs out of place, spacing that feels off, weights that do not balance.
- Use the Writing Studio to type or paste any passage, and note what you see.
- Send your notes to Thupten Chakrishar by replying to the message that brought you here.
The Writing Studio
Type Wylie, see Tibetan. Then tell us what you see.
A quiet page for long passages, built for this review. Type Wylie and watch it become Tibetan as you go, or paste Tibetan straight in. Choose the weight and the size; nothing else on the page but the text.
- Live Wylie → Tibetan as you type, with gentle hints for anything the converter cannot parse
- Paste Tibetan from anywhere, English and emoji included: they stay as they are
- One click loads a mixed passage of Tibetan, English and happy faces
- Saves itself in your browser; nothing is uploaded