Ubuntu Font Family

Revision 1 as of 2010-08-15 14:32:52

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The Ubuntu Font Family are a set of matching new Free- and open-fonts in development during 2010-2011. The development is being funded by Canonical of behalf the wider Free Software community and the Ubuntu project. The technical font design work and implementation is being undertaken by Dalton Maag. Members of the Ubuntu core development team are packaging the font in .deb format.

Timeline

As of August 2010, development is on-going and continuous. Snapshots are being gradually rolled out on a phased basis, to wider circles of people, and in larger snapshots as the opportunity of each six-monthly Ubuntu release approaches:

  • Ubuntu 10.04: very early snapshot used for the 2010 X/K/Ubuntu re-branding exercise

  • Ubuntu 10.10: Should have four faces in sans-serif style: Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic

  • Ubuntu 11.04: Additional faces, and expanded language coverage, including Monospace for terminal use!

Like all software destined for the Ubuntu main repository, the Ubuntu Font Family will be under a completely Free/open licence before it gets added!

Phased beta

The initial Alpha and Beta testing of the Ubuntu Font Family has been rolled out in phases under progressively more open distribution conditions:

  • Canonical design team ("DX"), proprietary, NDAed, Sup3r S3cr3t (later 2009)
  • Canonical employees, proprietary, NDAed (early 2010)
  • Ubuntu members + web-preview, proprietary (July 2010)
  • more to come!...

The font family is a long-term project and the phased feedback process is not something that everyone has immediately embraced! It is however a historical development: Dave Crossland (of the Open Font Library) notes on the LWN article that this the first time that a traditional font foundry company has been prepared to release any beta test versions of their in-development fonts. Hopefully in the future the Ubuntu Font Family can be held up as an example of success and open up the possibilities to go even further. Lets make this work!

From a font-designers point-of-view, half-finished fonts have a habit of getting distributed in the wild "like viruses" with cause all sorts of issues like people's documents to re-flow as characters are refined before the final version.

References

Ubuntu Developer Summit-M:

Design team

Dalton Maag

News

Coverage

  • 1,200 glyphs
  • 200-250 languages
  • native languages of 3 billion people!

Fonts

The Ubuntu Font Family is a sans-serif typeface family with an intended coverage of thirteen fonts:

Font

Regular

Bold

Italic

Bold Italic

Ubuntu

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Ubuntu Monospace

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Ubuntu Light

Yes

Yes

Ubuntu Medium

Yes

Yes

Ubuntu Condensed

Yes

Scripts

Latin

Extended: A+B+more...

Greek

Monotonic+Polytonic+variations

Cyrillic

Extended

Arabic

Hebrew

Mathematical

Limited

Technology

  • OpenType-based TTF (TrueType)

  • Alternative glyphs (eg. proportional/non-proportional/superscript/subscript numerals)
  • Debugging glyphs (U+EFFD, U+EFFE, U+EFFF, U+F000) giving face, version, grayscale level and pixels-per-em digit display)

The pixels-per-em 7-segment digits are driven by the hint engine, so if hinting is by default off (eg. Firefox) then the output will show as a pair of '88' numerals.

Design process

The four Latin characters, 'n o H O' helped to define a guide for around 80-percent of the remaining characters.

Extensive manual hinting has been performed for rendered sizes below 60 pixels-per-em.

Software tools

Dalton Maag are using the following tools:

  • Font Lab
  • Microsoft Visual
  • In-house Python-based accent placement scripts

In Ubuntu:

  • Gucharmap (Applications->Accessories->Character Map)

  • fontmatrix (apt-get install fontmatrix)

  • FontForge (apt-get install fontforge)

FontForge (as of mid-2010) does not handle some extended OpenType features, hopefully having a Free font that uses these features will speed development in being able to support the them!