Ucha Pind (2021) movie poster

Gurvetica is used for the poster of Ucha Pind, an Indian Punjabi-language film directed by Harjit Singh Ricky, starring Poonam Sood and Navdeep Kaler. The other Gurmukhi font is GHP Full, and the English text is set in all-caps Century Gothic.

Designed in 2009 and supplied in many widths and weights, Gurvetica is a font that is designed to give the Gurmukhi world the clarity and legibility that Helvetica gives the Latin-reading world.

The font is normally available in Gurmukhi and Latin although there are versions that have Gurmukhi in the ASCII range instead of Latin characters, using the phonetic layout that is common in Gurmukhi fonts.

However, there are a number of differences between the Latin version of Gurvetica and Helvetica:

Firstly, Gurvetica is mono-linear – if you want it not to be then you can just stretch it a little bit.

Secondly, as the weight increases the lines grow from the centre of the lines, including from the edges. This is because unlike Latin, where the top and the bottom of the font fit between the baseline and the caps height and as the weight increases, it still fits, Gurmukhi has a bar from which the font grows both upwards and downwards so as the weight increases, the centre of this line stays the same so that an emboldened word does not jump up or fall down relative to the words that surround it; and,

Lastly, the ends of the letters are not always horizontal or vertical as they are with Helvetica – this is simply because if the Gurmukhi characters were forces to adopt this characteristic, the font would become ugly.