Jo De Baerdemaeker

The Sherpa-project

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Following his research trip to Bhutan in November and December 2014, Dr Jo De Baerdemaeker started the self-initiated project ‘Sherpa: the writing systems of the Himalayas’ in which he studies the different writing systems that are used in the region of the Himalayan mountain range in Asia.

His research investigates the origin and development of these scripts in different paleographic and typographic styles, with the purpose of designing and developing the Sherpa font, a digital type family for typesetting the languages and dialects of the Himalayas in their scripts of origin, with corresponding Latin transliterations and translations.

The project starts with studying, and designing the Sherpa typeface, for the Lantsa (Rañjanā) script, and will continue with Tibetan, Phags-pa, Lepcha, Mongolian, Soyombo, and Devanagari scripts.