These two websites may be of interest:
Mật Tông - Vietnamese Esoteric Buddhism
Some interesting Lantsa calligraphy here - most of the site is in Vietnamese but the visual stuff is good.
Siddham & Ranjana Keyboard
When this first launched I wasn't impressed. I don't like the CBETA Siddhaṃ font for start. But recently I re-visited the site and it seems to have come a long way. What really interested me was the input method for Ranjana and a decent Ranjana font. It's pretty good except for the spacing - it seems as though the letters are about 200% too wide so can't be grouped together to write words or mantras. (I used a character spacing of -20pts in Word and got a better, if slightly uneven, result). The Ranjana font isn't Unicode (I think conjuncts are displayed using individual characters rather than ligatures), and there are some gaps (dhīḥ and tāṃ can't be input for instance). However its a good start and the results are certainly better than my shakey calligraphy!
Buddhist calligraphy and epigraphy. Mantra, Dhāraṇī, Sūtra. Languages: Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan. Scripts: Siddhaṃ aka Bonji (梵字), Tibetan (dbu-can/Uchen), Ranjana/Lantsa, Devanāgarī.
Very interesting. That Vietnamese site is rather neat, and I like the images made up of lines of Siddham text. Reminds me a big of Arabic word art, although not nearly as complex.
ReplyDeleteI hate to advertise here, but you may be interested in a blog I've created to display my work in my own script (took me a while to start to find letter forms I liked).
Hi Barry
ReplyDeleteThanks for respecting my blog. However I've looked at your blog and it looks promising: http://modernbrahmi.wordpress.com/
I'll watch with interest to see what emerges.
Jayarava
On making more use of the Lantsa input I discover that it lacks a number of common conjuncts and/or consonant vowel combinations. I can compensate using Photoshop, but we're still waiting for a fully functional Ranjana/Lantsa font.
ReplyDelete