Lepcha, or Róng, is a unique minority script used in parts of India, Nepal and Bhutan. Although it shares some features with other Indic scripts, it also possesses some of its own unique challenges.

As you can see in the sample above, Lepcha uses lots of special marks and requires ligatures as well as graphic transposition and reordering in order to create meaningful Lepcha text. The font supplied with the Lepcha Language Kit takes care of all these things for you.

Lepcha has yet to be included in Unicode as of version 4.0 but a proposal to include it is currently in process. Rather than wait, we have opted to encode our Lepcha support now using the tentative codepoints assigned in the proposal. This approach will allow users to begin using Unicode now for Lepcha documents but may be subject to changes when the script is officially adopted into Unicode. Changes, if any, are expected to be minimal.

We’d love to hear from people or organizations who are working with Lepchas or the Lepcha language and we’re happy to make our Unicode support available free of charge to anyone helping to preserve the Lepcha language and heritage.

Although we normally create our own fonts for all of our products, the Lepcha Language Kit will hopefully include a third-party font created by Jason Glavy (this is the font depicted above). We’ve adapted the Unicode encoding and added the intelligence to display the script properly but the outlines were created by Jason.

We are working on our own Lepcha font but there’s no reason why users should have to wait and Jason’s font is quite nice!