Mandalorian Font This Star Wars font is based on samples of Mandalorian seen in the Episode II Visual Dictionary as well as menu screens from the 2004 DVD release of Star Wars. Download mandalor.zip   This font includes all English letters, numbers, and common punctuation marks (basically, all the stuff displayed on the keyboard). Uppercase and lowercase letters are identical. Also, kerning has been enabled for this font (see "What is kerning?" on my Fonts FAQ page for a discussion of kerning). Here's a full table of Mandalorian letters and their respective keys. Click image for a really big printable version   Accuracy of This Font My main source for this font is a menu screen taken from the 2004 release of the Star Wars DVDs. When you have the disk for Episode IV - A New Hope loaded, you need to make sure you are viewing the Tatooine theme. When you select Options, you'll be brought into the cantina, where you'll see different alien alphabets quickly flash on your screen before the actual options are displayed. Two of the alien alphabets displayed are Aurebesh and Mandalorian, shown below. Aurebesh (left) and Mandalorian (right) Click images for larger versions By comparing these two screens, I noticed that the number of letters in each line was the same, regardless of the alphabet. In other words, they said the exact same thing, only in different alphabets. The only trick is the middle column: on the Aurebesh screen it's the same as the right column; on the Mandalorian screen, it's the same as the left column, only flipped updside-down. Once I realized this, all I had to do was "translate" the Aurebesh back into English, and then I would have the character values for the Mandalorian. Unfortunately, there were some letters and numbers that were not present: m, p, q, v, x, z, 1, 2, and 0. There was also no punctuation. In order to fill in the gaps, I used what I had as an inspiration for the rest. Because of that, I'd say this font is only 75% accurate. And in case you're curious, the DVD screen doesn't "say" anything. It's just a jumble of random letters and numbers. Is it Really Mandalorian? Yes. In the Episode II Visual Dictionary, there's a small readout of the technical display from the Slave I. Check it out below, and you can clearly see the similarity between it and the alphabet that appears on the DVD. Slave I Technical Readout from Episode II Visual Dictionary Click image for larger version Confirmation from Karen Traviss I've received several e-mails and seen posts on message boards that question the accuracy of this font. People don't understand how some random Joe can stumble upon LucasFilm's secret Mandalorian alphabet, or whether it's really Mandalorian at all. (Beware, ye who doubt me. I am a super Star Wars font nerd!) So it may settle some people down to read a post by Karen Traviss, the creator of the Mandalorian language (not alphabet), discussing my very font. In this thread at theforce.net (go ahead and read it for yourself if you don't trust me), Karen said on 9/4/2005: Yep, that looks the same font as I've got, which is the full one. The guy says he knows some of it is missing so he made up a chunk of it, which means it's not accurate - I'd check it letter by letter against my copy, but I'm a bit short of time at the moment. There's a retcon problem, though - there's no F, X or Z in Mandalorian as Jesse and I did it. So I'm going to ignore those letters or do a magnificent retcon before your very eyes - they had to add in those letters to render foreign names properly. Voila! Retcon on the fly. I'll see about making that official... EDIT: I've now had a quick look through and some of the letters don't correspond to the table I was given, alas. But given how he had to work it out, he didn't do a bad job at all. First, I'll give you a moment to digest the fact that there IS a secret Mandalorian alphabet sulking in the depths of Skywalker Ranch. It's a shame this has not been released. Fans would gobble up a full, official version of the font like crazy, and I'd bet they'd even pay for it. So, now that we've got that out of the way, I'll summ up: Karen says that she has a Lucas-internal version of the Mandalorian font, and that mine is a close - but not exact - match to what she has. Can we all agree that's good enough, until the stone facade of LucasFilm cracks open and the official Mandalorian font falls out? Well, this is the best I can do. Enjoy!

This page last modified on 7/2/2008
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