Zen Garden Pen

The handwritten lettering of Zen Garden, free for anyone to use. It is based on Nanum Pen Script by NHN Corporation, with 168 new characters drawn in the same pen.

Download the font

Version 1.002 · TTF, OTF, WOFF2 and WOFF · 770 KB · SIL Open Font License 1.1

characters: 289
new ones: 168
languages: 101
new ones: 48

Sweeping the garden,
a broom that has forgotten
the snow.

Matsuo Bashō

Try it

Type anything here. Bashō, café, naïef, № 108, €12.99

72Rake slowly
48Rake slowly, sit a while
32Rake slowly, sit a while. Ōtomo’s café
24Rake slowly, sit a while. Ōtomo’s café, № 108, €12.99
18Rake slowly, sit a while. Ōtomo’s café, № 108, €12.99. Één ideeën, naïef ’n ding.
14Rake slowly, sit a while. Ōtomo’s café, № 108, €12.99. Één ideeën, naïef ’n ding. Größe, señor, ¿qué?

The characters

from Nanum Pen Scriptnew in Zen Garden Penredrawn

Capitals 66

Small letters 73

Figures 18

Punctuation 54

!
"
#
%
&
'
(
)
*
,
-
.
/
:
;
?
@
[
\
]
_
{
}
¡
§
«
¶
·
»
¿
‐
‑
‒
–
—
―
‘
’
‚
‛
“
”
„
‟
†
‡
•
…
‧
‰
′
″
‹
›

Currency 16

Symbols 22

Accents 14

Not shown: 26 spaces, joiners and combining accents (25 of them new), which have no ink of their own. Hover over a character for its name.

101 languages

Zen Garden Pen has every letter of 101 languages written in the Latin alphabet, going by each language’s alphabet in Unicode’s CLDR. Nanum Pen Script had 53 of them.

New in Zen Garden Pen 48

Afrikaans
Albanian
Basque
Corsican
Danish
Dutch
Estonian
Faroese
Filipino
Finnish
French
Friulian
Galician
German
Guadeloupean Creole
Haitian Creole
Icelandic
Interlingue
Irish
Italian
Javanese
Kabuverdianu
Kalaallisut
Ligurian
Low German
Luxembourgish
Manx
Martinican Creole
Māori
Northern Sotho
Norwegian Bokmål
Norwegian Nynorsk
Occitan
Portuguese
Rejang
Romansh
Sango
Sardinian
Scottish Gaelic
Sena
Spanish
Sundanese
Swedish
Swiss German
Tswana
Venetian
Walloon
Western Frisian

Already in Nanum Pen Script 53

Asu
Bemba
Bena
Cebuano
Chiga
Cornish
English
Gusii
Hindi (Latin)
Ido
Indonesian
Interlingua
Iskonawa
Jju
Kalenjin
Kinyarwanda
Lojban
Lombard
Luo
Luyia
Machame
Makhuwa
Makhuwa-Meetto
Makonde
Malay
Morisyen
North Ndebele
Nyankole
Oromo
Rombo
Rundi
Rwa
Samburu
Sangu
Shambala
Shipibo-Konibo
Shona
Soga
Somali
South Ndebele
Southern Sotho
Swahili
Swati
Taita
Taroko
Teso
Toki Pona
Tsonga
Vunjo
Wolastoqey
Xhosa
Zhuang
Zulu

Not yet: Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh need letters it doesn’t have. It has no Japanese, Korean or Arabic characters.

Drawn with the same pen

Most of the new characters are built from the original’s own strokes, so they share its width, its ends and its texture:

-ōthe hyphen became the macrons and the dashes
.ëthe period became the dieresis, the dot accent and the ellipsis
,çthe comma became the cedilla
C€the C with two hyphen bars became the euro sign

Every original character is unchanged, checked pixel for pixel against Nanum Pen Script, except three: Z and z lost their crossbar, and № is now an N with a small raised o. The new characters were drawn with Claude Opus 5.5 while we built the game.

Using it

On a Mac or PC: open ZenGardenPen-Regular.ttf and choose Install. Install the TTF or the OTF, not both.
On a website: host the WOFF2 file and load it with @font-face. The README in the download has the CSS.
In an app: bundle the TTF. It is the same file Zen Garden ships.

Licence

Zen Garden Pen is free under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. You can use it in personal and commercial work, and bundle, embed or modify it. You can’t sell the font on its own, and a modified version stays under the same licence. Keep OFL.txt with the font files.