titleSrijika: OpenType-Layout-Reusing Font Restyling for Nine Indic Scripts
authorsAnil Pai
date2026-09-04
venuearXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed)
idarXiv:2609.05661
affiliationLoopdesk AI
upvotes14 (Hugging Face Daily Papers, 2026-11-01)
linksabs pdf hf
abstractWe present Srijika, a system for producing installable OpenType fonts for nine Brahmic scripts: Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, and Odia. Rather than generating fonts from scratch, Srijika restyles glyph outlines from shaping-complete template fonts. It preserves the template's cmap and GSUB closure and its GPOS data under a documented metric policy, making every output a complete font by construction. This addresses a central challenge of Indic font generation: hundreds to thousands of conjuncts, half forms, and matra variants must remain mutually consistent under OpenType shaping. Srijika produces 66 TTFs: 57 curated presets and nine open-vocabulary showcase fonts. All pass the OpenType Sanitizer, while HarfBuzz and CoreText reproduce the template glyph-ID sequences on conjunct-heavy probes. A full-closure audit covering 80,915 glyphs and 54,812 anchors quantifies metric changes. Natural-language style selection uses Lipika, a retrieval index over approximately 650 open-license font families. A reference-conditioned latent diffusion model redraws template glyphs in the selected style, followed by content gating, harmonization, and shaped-cluster verification with fallback to template outlines. We evaluate against no-learning baselines. On diffusion-training-family-held-out SSIM gates, template copying outperforms generation on 50 of 56 faces. Style movement is measurable only with an internal same-model embedding whose training corpus includes the held-out families, so these results require caution. A learned baseline, independent style metric, and human study are outside this report's scope. Our contributions are the layout-reusing formulation and pipeline, its nine-script audit and benchmark, and a negative-results catalogue covering failed conditioning, objective choices, and data-hull limits of reference-guided restyling.

cite

@misc{pai2026srijika,
  title={Srijika: OpenType-Layout-Reusing Font Restyling for Nine Indic Scripts},
  author={Anil Pai},
  year={2026},
  eprint={2609.05661},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05661}
}