Font Downloads

To start using Musa, you'll need a font to display it, and a keyboard to enter text.

So far, Musa has 12 text font families available - regular, bold, italic, and bold italic - plus 3 ornamental fonts, 12 adjuvant fonts, and 2 technical fonts. Licenses for these fonts are described here. Click the names below to download the ones you want, or click this button to download all of the fonts:

The first word of the font name is just a name, like 'Arial' or 'Helvetica'. Fonts that share their name belong to the same font family. The second word is always 'Musa', to show that this font offers coverage of the Musa letters (codepoints E000-E2FF (Eminem uses E3xx). The remaining words are the gait (click here for a list of gaits), and finally the style (regular or bold and/or italic. All the fonts are in the OpenType format (OTF files), so they're compatible with all computers and phones.

Text Fonts

Text fonts are fonts you might use to write a entire text in a language, as opposed to just a title or sample.

Dushan

The Dushan font family is the Helvetica of the Musa world. It's a solid monospace body font for Alphabet gait that's easy to read, looks good at any size, and doesn't require any Advanced Typography features. It includes basic ASCII the same size, so you can mix them in a monospace environment (like a text editor).

Kraljevo

Kraljevo (pronounced Krālyevo) is a kerned variant of Dushan: adjacent letters that don't interfere are moved half a cell closer, so there's less whitespace within a word. Because of that, Kraljevo doesn't use a dot between words.

Taunus

Taunus is a Ligature font, so many suffixes will be written attached to the consonant they modify. That's especially useful in languages with large inventories of suffixed consonants: Russian with soft consonants, Irish with slender consonants, Arabic with emphatic consonants, Hausa with both labialized and palatalized consonants, and many others. Like Kraljevo, Taunus is kerned, but it uses the dot.

Yousuf

Yousuf is also a Ligature font, but primarily a title font: for titles, headers, notices, and so forth. The letters are more decorative, with pointier points and curvier curves.

Averroes

Averroes is an Abjad font for most Semitic languages: the vowels are smaller and appear above or below the line of consonants.

Njoya

Njoya is a Syllabary font for Niger-Congo languages. Each glyph represents an entire syllable: consonant, vowel, tone and nasality.

Kaleb

Kaleb is an Abugida font for most Afroasiatic languages. Vowels are attached to consonants, but in various positions.

Ramanujan

Ramanujan is an Akshara font for South Asian languages. Vowels are written as swashes adorning the preceding consonant.

Zhouhei 周黑

Zhouhei is a Fangzi or character font, for languages that are written with syllables grouped into a single block. The current revision supports at least the following languages: (Standard) Chinese, Cantonese, Taishanese, Fukienese, Shanghaiese, Vietnamese, and Thai. Zhouhei is a Hēitǐ 黑体 (sans-serif or Gothic) font.

Kunming 昆明

Kunming is another Fangzi font, but in Sòngtǐ 宋体 (woodblock) style, with serifs.

Wangkai 王楷

Wangkai is yet another Fangzi font, but in Kāití 楷体 (brush) style. It's named after Wáng Cìzhòng 王次仲, a founder of Chinese calligraphy.

Yasuhiro

The Yasuhiro font family is for Kana gait, for Japanese, Ainu, and Okinawan. Each letter represents a consonant + vowel pair, possibly with a medial y or w. The last vowel before a pitch downstep is written high.

To display kerning, ligatures, kana or characters correctly, you may have to enable them in your application - read the Help pages to find out how. (Many fonts no longer display in Microsoft Word® for Windows any more, as of one of the 2020 updates. It's not just Musa fonts that have a problem, so it's not a Musa problem. Some Musa fonts display correctly: Taunus, Kraljevo, Hentrax.)

Once you have installed a Musa font, you can test it on the Font Test page.

Ornamental Fonts

An ornamental font is used as a form of decoration, usually just for a title or a short paragraph (not for an entire text) or in a decorative context where ease of reading isn't the only criterion.

Penflower

Penflower is an Alphabet font for many languages. It's meant to evoke flowers growing in a field.

Tharbis

Tharbis is an ornamental abugida font that shows vowels as "frames" around consonants.

Meander

Meander is a cursive font: the letters of each word are connected, so you can write each word without lifting your pen. The shapes are a little unfamiliar (like cursive on other scripts), but once you get how it works, it's amusing.

Hentrax

Hentrax (because it looks like hen tracks!) is an Element font: it breaks down each letter into its constituent shapes. The shapes are designed to be easy to distinguish, with sharper angles and smoother curves, and obvious orientation. Hentrax is intended for use by blind people (as raised text), by dyslexics, and for optical character recognition (OCR).

Adjuvant Fonts

There are also fonts we use for teaching Musa, to help learners parse Musa. There are several different types:

• Transliteration ("Trans") fonts replace the Musa letters with letters from another script, in effect transliterating the text in place.
• Ruby fonts show another script in small letters above or below the Musa, so you can see both, like Japanese furigana, Chinese rubi characters, Arabic harakat, or Hebrew niqqud.
• Diacritic fonts offer small Musa letters that fit above another script, for example to indicate pronunciation. Unlike the other types, these Musa diacritics ("vocritics", for vowel diacritics) are separate codepoints from the base letters.

The Tomokana Musa Ruby font shows hiragana above Musa Kana gait:

The Pengyou Musa Ruby font shows (slightly non-standard) pinyin below Musa Fangzi gait:

The Roman Musa Trans font respells Musa letters in a generic Roman alphabet:

The Subtitle Musa Ruby font shows Roman letters underneath Musa Alphabet gait:

The Heritage Musa Trans font respells Musa letters in the enPR phonemic transcription used by Wiktionary and the American Heritage Dictionary for English only:

The Hermitage Musa Ruby font shows those same enPR / AHD transcriptions underneath Musa Alphabet gait:

The Ripe Musa Trans font shows the IPA spelling of the sounds of Musa letters:

The Overripe Musa Ruby font shows IPA letters underneath Musa Alphabet gait:

The Unripe Musa Trans font shows the Musa spelling of the sounds of IPA letters:

The Underripe Musa Ruby font shows Musa letters underneath IPA:

The Pygmalion Musa Diacritic font offers Musa vowel diacritics ("vocritics") that fit above Roman vowels.

The Galatea Musa Diacritic font includes Musa vowels and consonants, and in addition a Roman base font. The vocritics are higher, raising the line height.

The Numeric Musa Trans font respells Musa numbers in Western numerals.

Technical Fonts

Technical fonts are used for math or programming. They include

• Formula fonts display formulas in 2D instead of 1D, making them easier to read.
• Markup fonts make Musa markup visible, making it easier to see which markup is applying where, when editing.

Tartaglia is a Formula font: it enables you to decorate the 1D spelling of a mathematical formula with lines above and below that connect matching brackets - the 2D form - thus making it much easier to read. Not ready yet

Eminem is a Markup font: it enables you to see Musa Markup as symbols embedded in the text.

Here's a page where you can test to make sure your Musa fonts have been installed:

Font Test page