Da and the Head Stroke as a Structural Line

The horizontal bar that runs along the top of a line of Ranjana is not a rule drawn first and written under. It is part of each letter, and it joins across a word as the writing proceeds, so the line grows with the hand. That has consequences a reader can use. Word divisions in the northern Brahmic scripts are shown by breaks in the bar rather than only by spaces, so the eye can find the boundaries of a word by following the top of the line. It also means that a text with the bar broken in the wrong places is harder to read rather than merely untidy. In Ranjana the bar carries additional weight because the script is a display hand: it is heavy, it contrasts with the fine strokes beneath, and it gives a panel of writing the ruled appearance that made the script attractive for ornament.

When Tibetan traditions adopted the script as Lantsa, that strong horizontal is a large part of what it was adopting, since a band of writing with a firm top edge sits well in a border or across a lintel and reads clearly at a distance. The bar is also the feature that a typeface has to get right before anything else. A Ranjana font whose head strokes do not meet cleanly across a word produces a broken line, and a broken line in this script reads as a series of wrong word divisions rather than as a minor flaw in the setting.