Indic Scripts Research Centre

The scripts of India — archived, developed,
and kept alive.

Research in Indic Scripts is an important area with many emerging applications, but very little dedicated work is being done at an institutional level with clearly defined long-term objectives. The Indic Scripts Research Centre at SAKS exists to change that.

SK Mohanty
SK Mohanty
Research Director, ISRC · Font Designer & Calligrapher

India's most respected font designer. Co-founder and Chief Font Design Architect at Reverie Language Technologies. Over 35 years in digital font design and development of Indic and other South-East Asian languages, multilingual technology, aesthetics, visual communication and calligraphy. He played a crucial role in the standardisation and font design of Indic Scripts for print and digital medium since the early 1990s.

The Need

Urgent work.
Almost no one is doing it.

Research in Indic Scripts is an area of considerable importance — for digital communication, for cultural preservation, for the development of new applications across India's many scripts and languages. Yet very little dedicated institutional work is being done, with clearly defined long-term objectives and the resources to pursue them.

Efforts are required in archiving and documentation, developing new standards and getting them accepted, designing and developing new fonts for the many Indic scripts for new digital applications, and research in Indian language typography. The ISRC at SAKS brings together, for the first time, the institutional infrastructure and the scholarly depth to pursue all of this in a sustained and coordinated way.

Under the direction of SK Mohanty — who has spent more than three decades at the front line of exactly this work — the ISRC is positioned to become the most significant centre for Indic script research in India.

Sugiura exhibition — script and book design
Kohei Sugiura exhibition — books, scripts, and design methodology
Sugiura BIC exhibition
Sugiura exhibition — Bangalore International Centre
Sugiura books and posters
Sugiura — books, posters, and publications from six decades
Indic script specimen
Indic script specimen — ISRC archive
Matrika journal
Matrika — bi-annual journal of Indic Scripts

Research Areas

Eleven active programmes
1
Documentation of Indic Scripts

History, development of letterforms, major landmarks, important personalities related to Indic scripts and their work — a systematic record that does not currently exist in one place.

2
Letterform Specimens

Compiling letterform specimens from different eras and periods: from stone inscriptions to palm-leaf and paper manuscripts, fonts from letterpress, phototypesetting, and the digital era.

3
Font Development for New Applications

Designing and developing fonts for new and emerging applications across Indic scripts — addressing the gap between the richness of the script traditions and the poverty of available digital typefaces.

4
Standardisation

Keyboard layouts and input standards for Indian scripts. Working towards getting standards in place — building on SK Mohanty's decades of work in exactly this area.

5
Typography & Typographic Research

Research and experimentation in Indic script typography — going beyond font design to the larger questions of how Indic scripts behave in print and on screen.

6
Readability & Legibility

Research into readability and legibility for Indic scripts — a field that remains significantly underdeveloped compared to equivalent research in Latin typography.

7
Multilingual Typography

Research into bilingual, trilingual, and multilingual typography — critical for a country with India's linguistic diversity, and for the design of interfaces that must serve many scripts simultaneously.

8
Formal & Visual Aspects

Study of the formal and visual aspects of Indic scripts — the structural logic of letterforms, their aesthetic principles, and their relationship to the philosophical traditions from which they emerge.

9
Workshops & Seminars

Organising workshops, symposia, and seminars related to Indic scripts — bringing together practitioners, scholars, and technologists who currently work in near-total isolation from each other.

10
Publication Programme

An active publication programme to disseminate research work — including the journal Matrika, occasional papers, and exhibition catalogues. Making the work visible is as important as doing it.

11
Courseware for Design Schools

Integrating work in Indic Scripts into the educational curriculum in Indian design schools — creating courseware that makes this knowledge accessible to the next generation of designers.

Matrika

Bi-annual Journal of Indic Scripts

Matrika has been conceived as a bi-annual journal devoted to Indic Scripts — to bridge the gap which exists in this major area of Indic Script Studies. It will be available both online and in print.

Editor
Kirti Trivedi
Designer
Muktha Hiremath
Masthead Design
Kimya Gandhi

Each issue covers

I
A major feature on an important font designer of Indic Scripts
II
Case study of font design
III
A research-based contribution
IV
An article on the philosophy of Indian letterforms
V
A visual feature

Script specimens & research material

ISRC archive
Indic script specimen
Matrika journal
Font design research

Specimen images, research documentation, and Matrika journal material from the Indic Scripts Research Centre at SAKS. Images to be replaced with actual ISRC archival material.

Currently
ISRC — research programmes active
Matrika — bi-annual journal, first issue forthcoming
Fellowship — commencing September 2026