A recognizable, modern Syriac script.
Eden is an Eastern Syriac (ܡܕܢܚܝܐ) typeface made primarily for digital text. It keeps the structure, contrast and silhouettes that make written Assyrian recognizable, and redraws them as type instead of imitating ink on paper.
- Script
- Syriac, Eastern
- Grid
- 100u bands
- Weight
- Regular
Digital Eastern Syriac fonts mostly go one of two ways: they copy ink on a manuscript, or they forget it altogether.
Skeuomorphic
These keep everything a broad nib cut at 5–20° leaves behind: chisel-cut tips, wedge entries, hairline flicks, strokes that swell where the ink pooled. On a screen there's no tool, and the hairlines drop out and the tips alias at text sizes.
Flattened
These fonts fix rendering issues by removing contrast: one weight, straight diagonals, the same ending everywhere. It's clean, but letters lose the features that tell them apart and make the text look Assyrian. It's a Latin sans applied to a script that doesn't work that way.
Eden sits between them. For each stroke, end and swell in the traditional letters, it asks whether the letter needs it or only the pen made it. What tells letters apart stays, what the script needs but the pen shaped is redrawn, and what only the pen made goes.
Every letter has to be recognizable.
Someone who learned to read from the scribal hand should know each letter right away. If simplifying a shape makes it harder to read, the shape stays.
Contrast comes from how the letter is written.
Some strokes are heavier than others because that's how the letter goes: Alap's stem, Lamad's tapering diagonal. Nothing is shaped to look like a nib cut it.
Turns end round, lifts end flat.
Where the pen turned at the end of a stroke, the end is round, like Alap's head and Gamal's tail. Where the pen lifted, the stroke stops flat. Sharp points are left where two curves meet and on the teeth.
The Shleṭa holds the word together.
The baseline stroke is 100 units tall and flat in every letter, and every join happens on it. The letters' feet are drawn to its height.
Letters are made of shared parts.
Stems, bowls, teeth and the Shleṭa are drawn once on a 50-unit grid and reused (see Parts). Fix a part and every letter that uses it is fixed too.