Every glyph in Yapiri has a story. Behind the clean digital curves you see today lie hundreds of crumpled papers, late-night revisions, and moments of quiet joy when a shape finally felt right. This is the story of how Yapiri came to life — stroke by stroke, breath by breath.
The First Spark
It began not on a computer, but on the back of an old notebook in a small room in Tripura. I wanted to write my language in a way that felt completely ours. No borrowed shapes. No forced compromises. Just pure Kokborok flowing naturally onto the page.
The very first sketches were rough — lines trying to capture the rhythm of our speech. Some letters came easily, almost as though they had been waiting. Others fought back for weeks, refusing every form I offered them.
"A script must feel like it grew from the language itself, not like it was placed on top of it."
— Early design noteThe Design Philosophy
From the beginning, I set three rules that shaped every decision:
- Each glyph must represent exactly one sound — no exceptions, no implied vowels, no cancellation marks.
- The forms should feel organic, never mechanical. A script is read by human eyes and written by human hands.
- The script must be beautiful enough for our children to love — because a script that does not invite pride will not be used.
This meant rejecting many individually elegant ideas. A form that looked striking in isolation but clashed with its neighbours, or that was beautiful but somehow did not feel Kokborok, had to go. The goal was never just functionality — it was cultural belonging. You can read more about the foundational choice behind this — building a phonemic alphabet rather than an abugida — in why Yapiri is a phonemic alphabet.
The Vowels: Where It Began
The six vowels were the first complete set to settle into their final forms. They had to be strong enough to stand as independent characters — equal in weight and presence to any consonant — while remaining visually distinct from each other at a glance.
The schwa — that neutral, central vowel so characteristic of Kokborok — gave me the most trouble. It needed its own dedicated form, something that communicated its particular quality without borrowing from any existing script tradition. It took more than a dozen rejected versions before its final shape arrived.
The Consonants: Balance in Pairs
The consonants came in pairs — plain and aspirated. This was the design challenge that shaped the script's whole visual character. Each aspirated consonant had to be visually legible as a sibling of its plain counterpart: related, but clearly distinct. The relationship between p and ph, between t and th, had to be readable at a glance.
The remaining consonants — affricates, nasals, fricatives, and approximants — each demanded their own investigation. Some shapes arrived in an afternoon. The palatal nasal nʹ took weeks; it kept insisting on forms that were either too busy or too bare.
The Numerals: A Complete System
Designing the numeral set was a task I approached with the same care as the consonants. Each of the ten digits — zero through nine — had to be immediately distinguishable from every other, while still belonging unmistakably to the same visual family as the rest of the script. They follow the standard decimal positional system and render cleanly at both display and small text sizes.
Punctuation and the High Tone Mark
Yapiri has five native punctuation marks — comma, full stop, exclamation, quotation, and question — each drawn from scratch rather than borrowed from any existing punctuation tradition. They follow the same stroke weight and visual rhythm as the rest of the script, so they sit naturally alongside letters in running text.
The high tone mark is Yapiri's only combining diacritic — the single most technically demanding character to implement. As a combining mark (encoded at U+F1CD1), it must attach correctly above whatever character precedes it, relying on OpenType GPOS mark-to-base anchors to position itself accurately. Getting this right across different rendering environments — browsers, desktop applications, mobile — required more rounds of testing than any other character in the set.
From Paper to Pixels
After dozens of iterations on paper, I moved to digital tools. This phase was, in many ways, brutal. What looked perfect on paper sometimes felt lifeless on screen — the warmth of the pencil line refusing to survive the transition to bezier curves. I redrew many glyphs more than twenty times in the digital environment alone.
Spacing and weight consistency were relentless disciplines. Every glyph had to feel at home beside every other glyph. The full character set could only be tested as a system — isolated forms that looked perfect in isolation sometimes created visual clashes in running text.
The Font Journey
Turning individual glyphs into a working font brought a new category of challenges. Spacing, kerning, weight consistency, and readability at small sizes all needed careful attention. I tested Yapiri.ttf constantly with real Kokborok sentences, with poetry, and with children's stories — because the places where a script is most used tell you most about where it fails.
Every time the text looked and felt natural, it was a small victory. The moment I knew we were genuinely close was when I could read an entire paragraph in Yapiri and notice only the meaning — not the script. That is the goal of every typeface: to disappear into the language it serves.
Lessons Learned
Creating Yapiri taught me that designing a script is an act of deep listening. You must listen to the language, to the people who speak it, and to the ancestors who carried it forward without any written form. Technical perfection means nothing if the soul is missing. A glyph that is technically correct but emotionally wrong will never feel natural in a reader's hands.
Today and Tomorrow
Yapiri v2.0 marks a significant maturation of the script. The font exists as a .ttf and a .woff2, with a Keyman keyboard package for native input and a web keyboard for instant access. In June 2026, Yapiri reached a major milestone: the Under-ConScript Unicode Registry (UCSUR) officially confirmed the block U+F1CA0–U+F1CFF for Yapiri Script — a stable, publicly documented codepoint allocation that clears the path toward a formal Unicode submission. The v2.0 inventory was also refined down to 45 characters, with f, chh, and the reduplication mark removed after closer linguistic analysis.
But the living part of the script's evolution has already begun. Every time someone types in Yapiri, draws it by hand, or teaches a child to recognise a glyph, the script continues to grow — not just technically, but culturally. That is the only evolution that truly matters. If you would like to try the font yourself, the web keyboard is the quickest place to begin, and the full font is available on the Download page.
The Heart of the Matter
The journey from sketch to font is more than design work. It is an act of cultural affirmation. Every glyph is a promise made to a language and to its children: your voice will be seen, respected, and carried forward with dignity.
To everyone who has supported Yapiri — thank you. Together, we are not just creating letters. We are writing a new chapter in the story of the Tiprasa people. Questions, reflections, and your own first words written in Yapiri are always welcome on the Community page.
May these glyphs carry our stories far into the future.
Community Thoughts
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