Could anyone tell me , what is the font used in Suttacentral ? It doesn’t seem to be the same as the Skolar font , as the title of the suttas even though they are actually in small letters (when I copy the title), but they appear to be in Capital.
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The font used in your post is Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif
The font used in the suttas is “Skolar Sans PE”, “Noto Sans”, sans-serif
Select the text in your browser and Inspect from the right-click menu to see all the attributes. Look for “font-family”
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Could you please tell me what font is this ? Because when I copy and paste this it becomes Bhayabheravasutta.
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Please right click that word on that page (not this page) and select Inspect. You should see this.
Fonts are not alway copied when pasted.
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Sorry If I confused you, but after copying notice that every character barring the first one becomes a small one.
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Yes. Copying is a cooperation between source and destination. Source may have fonts that the destination does not support. In general, copying of text with fonts only really works from identical applications. Here, SuttaCentral itself is really two applications. One displays the suttas. The other is the forum where we are discussing now.
The other thing about fonts is that some fonts render small letters as “small-capitals”. Again here the fact that source and destination are different affects copying. Eskimos have more words for snow that English. Some things just don’t translate, so we just live with them as they are.
The one unambiguous way to convey meaning is by pictures, which you’ve already demonstrated. Unfortunately, pictures are large and unwieldy and not designed to be spell-checked since they aren’t text. There’s really no good solution to the problem you pose. Asking everybody to use the same application for everything would be draconian and introduce new suffering.
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Could you share the page you are getting that from? I can’t find a place that displays the Pali title in small caps like that.
I believe in the code, the text is in normal case. That is why when you copy and paste it, it appears in normal case.
I think this is causing it to be small caps when it displays on the site (but it’s not exactly the text you are asking about)
A small cap font (often ending with SC in the name) takes all the lower case letters and makes them capital but smaller. Something like that is happening here. So the font is definitely Skolar. But it looks like it is a variation that has small caps.
Here is a small cap font on google fonts that you can play around with the “type here to preview” box. fonts.google.com/specimen/Marcellus+SC?query=marcellus
Does that make sense? This is actually a feature of modern web design. With a few clicks the designer can decide if they want the text to display in small caps without changing the actual text.
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Thanks for asking the tough questions!
Yes, the font used throughout SC is Skolar. We use Skolar PE for serif fonts, and Skolar Sans PE for sans-serif.
As pointed out by Karl and Snowbird, the appearance of small-caps is controlled by the site CSS. Both ordinary and small-caps versions of lower-case are found in the same font file, and the application tells it which one to use.
I chose Skolar as it is one of the very few fonts that has the extremely wide character set demanded by SC, and its sophisticated design has a high readability. At the time there were no free fonts that satisfied all my requirements, so we bought a license for Skolar.
Fun fact: I have been in touch with Skolar’s designer, David Brezina, and it was due to my request that he added support for Vietnamese glyphs. Currently, he is working on a variable font version of the Skolar superfamily, which I took for a test run some months ago. Making a huge and sophisticated font like this takes many years of work.
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