Lanydza

THL Toolbox > Tibetan Scripts, Fonts & Related Issues > Tibetan Fonts > Lanydza

Lanydza

Contributor(s) to this documentation: Chris Fynn, Steve Weinberger.

Description

Lanydza is a script traditionally used for writing Newar language (where it is called Rañjanā or Kutila). In Tibetan culture, Lanydza is used in Tibetan texts, epigraphs, art, and so forth for writing Sanskrit text titles and mantras.

As of 2017, Lanydza/Rañjanā is not encoded in the Unicode Standard. There are 8-bit fonts for Newar-style R Rañjanā, which is somewhat different than Lanydza. Until Lanydza/ Rañjanā are encoded in Unicode it is possible to map the glyphs in a Lanydza font to Devānagari, Prachalit (another Newar script) or Tibetan.

Our current recommendation is to input text in Devānagari and then when Lanydza/Rañjanā does get encoded and fonts are available, it should not be too difficult to convert.

There is a non-unicode 8-bit Rañjanā font and input; contact Devdass Manandhar (ddmanandhar [at] gmail.com). However, this font is Newar-style Rañjanā and only supports combinations of a maximum of two characters. This is sufficient for writing Newar text in Rañjanā but would be limiting for more complex Sanskrit combinations.

Documentation and tables of correspondence between Sanskrit and Lanydza/Rañjanā can be found here, thought note that these are limited to two-character combinations:
external link: https://www.omniglot.com/writing/ranjana.htm
external link: http://malaiya.tripod.com/ranjana/Ranjana.pdf

Provided for unrestricted use by the external link: Tibetan and Himalayan Library