mooniak

Mooniak Font Process — Tools & Apps

A map of the repos and apps that make Sri Lankan-script type happen at Mooniak: from the glyphset standard, through the build system, out to the apps people actually use. Some of these are public; several are still private or unpublished — marked below. See also the styled version of this page: tools/index.html.

Status current as of July 2026 — private repos in particular move fast.

How it fits together

flowchart LR
    LG["Lanka Glyphsets\n(standard)"] --> SFT["Sinhala Font Tools\n(dev toolkit)"]
    SFT --> FR["font-repos\n(~90 font repos)"]
    FR --> MNIK["mnik / mooniak-font-tools\n(build system)"]
    MNIK -->|"showcase --publish"| DIR["directory\n(public showcase)"]
    MNIK -->|"channel-index.json"| FP["fontpipe\n(fontpackagemanager)"]
    FP --> AKURU["Akuru App\n(font library)"]
    LG -.->|"fonts for shaping tests"| BP["Bookpress\n(book typesetting)"]

Lanka Glyphsets defines what a conformant Sinhala/Tamil font must contain — the glyphset tiers and the glyph naming standard.
Sinhala Font Tools is the shared dev toolkit and docs layer that every font project in font-repos/ draws on (design-stage tracking, test texts, glyph charts built from Lanka Glyphsets data).
Each typeface lives in its own repo inside the font-repos/ workspace (~90 of them — mostly private FontMaster-legacy revivals, some public).
mnik / mooniak-font-tools is the build system that scans, builds, QAs, and proofs every repo in font-repos/, then fans its output two ways:
- publishes a browsable status page to the public directory repo (src.mooniak.com), and
- writes channel-index.json, the machine-readable feed fontpipe consumes.
fontpipe is the distribution app: it reads that channel index plus each repo’s fontpackage.json, and installs/updates fonts on a user’s machine.
Akuru App’s Font Library tool is the consumer-facing surface for that distribution — a font installer for end users, alongside a canvas, glossary, and text converter for Sinhala/Tamil/English work.
Bookpress sits a little to the side as a proving ground: a book-typesetting app that pulls real fonts (including Lanka Glyphsets-conformant ones) to lay out actual trilingual books.

Lanka Glyphsets

github.com/mooniak/lanka-glyphsets — Public

The standard everything else is built against. Defines four cumulative Sinhala glyphset tiers (Kernel / Core / Plus / Pro, mapped to ICTA’s Level 1–3 classification) plus a Tamil glyphset, and a normative glyph-naming standard (visual-form-based, e.g. kRa-sinh for ක්‍ර).

Ships two packages: @mooniak/lankaglyphsets (npm, TypeScript reader + CLI) and mnik-lankafea (PyPI, Sinhala/Tamil OpenType feature generation + glyph-dependency validation). Also includes a HarfBuzz-based shaping conformance checker (tools/font-coverage/).

Feeds: its generated data is vendored by Sinhala Font Tools’ glyph-chart tool; the naming standard is what individual font repos are renamed against; Bookpress uses Lanka Glyphsets-conformant fonts for its Sinhala shaping tests.

Sinhala Font Tools

github.com/mooniak/sinhala-font-tools — Public

The shared docs-and-dev-toolkit layer for multiscript (Sinhala/Tamil/Latin) font projects: project-status conventions (actively-developed → deprecated), release-channel definitions (dev / nightly), a sinhala-composites.yaml reference, design-stage tracking, a bank of test texts, and browser-based tools (glyph chart, font tester) used across the font-repos workspace.

Distinct from — but a sibling/descendant of — akuru/sinhala-font-tools (“Tools, templates and specifications for sinhala font development”), the original Akuru Collective repo Mooniak’s own version grew out of.

Build tools — mnik (mooniak-font-tools)

github.com/mooniak/mooniak-font-tools — Private

The homebase for every font project. Holds no fonts itself — those live as sibling git repos inside font-repos/ — and instead provides mnik, one Python package with three interchangeable surfaces (CLI, Makefile, and a local Flask dashboard) covering the whole pipeline:

Build: build (gftools), collect, scale, qa (fontspector)
Manifests: manifest, channel-index, doctor (drift checks)
Sync: pull built fonts back from CI
Publish: registry, showcase (→ the public directory site), proof-pdf, native export (Glyphs.app)
Repo ops: status / commit / push / pull / template-sync across every repo in the workspace at once

channel-index.json — aggregated per-repo, per-channel build data — is explicitly the hand-off point: mnik’s own docs describe it as “the public data source that fontpipe consumes.”

fontpipe

Lives in github.com/mooniak/fontpackagemanager — Private (repo name predates the product name; the binary, crates, and README all say “fontpipe”)

A GitHub-native font package manager — a Tauri 2 desktop app (Rust + React) that subscribes to font repositories via a fontpackage.json manifest standard, installs fonts system-wide, and auto-updates across release / dev / nightly channels. Handles per-OS font activation natively (CoreText on macOS, GDI on Windows).

Consumes: channel-index.json from mnik. Feeds: the installer engine behind Akuru App’s Font Library tool.

Bookpress

No public repo yet — local-only, not pushed to GitHub.

A book-typesetting desktop app for publishers, built on Tauri 2 with the Typst compiler embedded natively in the Rust backend (structured-model-as-truth: a structured book model is the source of truth, with deterministic one-way codegen to Typst). Ships live per-page SVG preview, click-to-jump editing, font management (embedded + system + project fonts), PDF export, and autosave/crash recovery.

Its font-handling test suite specifically exercises Sinhala shaping using Lanka Glyphsets-conformant fonts — making it the most concrete real-world consumer of the whole standard-to-font pipeline, laying out actual trilingual (Sinhala/Tamil/English) books rather than just rendering type specimens.

Akuru App

Landing/waitlist page: github.com/mooniak/akuruapp-landing — Public The app itself — Unpublished (alpha, no public source repo; waitlist)

A desktop “super app” for individuals, businesses, and organisations working with text, fonts, and writing in Sri Lanka’s official languages. The alpha ships four tools: a font library (font installer — Google Fonts today, expanding to Mooniak’s own catalogue), a canvas for trying fonts without installing, a glossary of official-language technical terms, and a Sinhala ASCII→Unicode text converter.

The font library is the natural end-user face of fontpipe’s distribution technology — where the standard (Lanka Glyphsets), the build system (mnik), and the distribution app (fontpipe) ultimately reach a reader who just wants a working font.

Also worth knowing about

directory — Public (src.mooniak.com) The public showcase for every Mooniak typeface — a static Astro site with no backend of its own. Its public/data/ is entirely generated and pushed by mnik showcase --publish from mooniak-font-tools; nothing under it is hand-edited. This is the visible, human-facing output of the build pipeline described above.