Abattis
[Dave Crossland]

Abattis is a free software type foundry launched in 2009 by Dave Crossland. Auto-description on his wiki: I'm a designer and nerd in Bournemouth, UK, and I do systems and network consultancy for a living. I completed a BA (Hons) Interaction Design degree at Ravensbourne College in 2006, and am currently on the MA Typeface Design course at Reading, from October 2007 to July 2009. My design philosophy centers around the parameterisation and automation of design to improve the design process, and some of my old ideas are published at designprocess.com. He is a proponent of open source code and of free fonts, and involves himself with dedication in the Open Font Library project. He defines Free fonts as follows: Free Fonts are about freedom, not price. They are fonts you are free to use for any purpose, fonts whose internals you are free to study, fonts you are free to improve, fonts you are free to redistribute, and fonts you are free to redistribute improved versions of which means - in the specific context of font software - fonts you are explicitly free to embedded, subset, bundle and derive from to create any kind of artwork. To be truly Free they must allow commercial use and even to be sold by anyone - as it is about freedom, not price. In 2009, for his MA work at Reading, he designed Cantarell, a free sans family, done together with Jakub Steiner, free at CTAN. OFL page. Finally, in 2009 or 2010, he started work on the Google Font Directory.

Klingspor link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

André Berg

Computer and software specialist. He made the Meslo LG font in 2010. As he says, Meslo LG is a customized version of Apple's Menlo-Regular font (which is a customized Bitstream Vera Sans Mono). He did not like certain spacing decisions in Menlo, and so decided to make Meslo LG, where LG stands for Line Gap. The free family, made in 2009-2010, consists of these styles: MesloLGL-Bold, MesloLGL-BoldItalic, MesloLGL-Italic, MesloLGL, MesloLGM-Bold, MesloLGM-BoldItalic, MesloLGM-Italic, MesloLGM, MesloLGS-Bold, MesloLGS-BoldItalic, MesloLGS-Italic, MesloLGS. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Arev Fonts
[Stephen Schrenk]

Motivated by mathematical applications, the "Arev" set of fonts adds Greek, Cyrillic, Latin-A, and some Latin-B, and Symbol characters (music and math, mainly) to Bitstream's Vera fonts. Stephen Schrenk (whose nom de plume is Tavmjong Bah) created the Arev Sans font. The text accompanying the Arev Sans package is: The package arev provides virtual fonts and LaTeX packages for using Arev Sans. Arev Sans is a derivative of Bitstream Vera Sans created by Tavmjong Bah by adding support for Greek and Cyrillic characters. Bah also added a few variant letters that are more appropriate for mathematics. The primary purpose for using Arev Sans in LaTeX is presentations, particularly when using a computer projector. Arev Sans is quite readable for presentations, with large x-height, "open letters," wide spacing, and thick stems. The style is very similar to the SliTeX font lcmss, but heavier. Stephen Hartke converted Arev Sans to Type 1 format, and created the virtual fonts and packages for using Arev Sans in LaTeX. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Arkandis Digital Foundry
[Hirwen Harendal]

French foundry, est. 2007, which published many extensive free sans and sans serif families by Hirwen Harendal, who supports Open Source projects. The purpose of ADF is to provide a large number of high quality fonts (174 fonts as of the end of August 2007). Harendal has help from Clea F. Rees, most notably on the TeX part and the extensive Venturis family.

His typefaces:

Accanthis (2009: an alternative for Galliard or Horley Oldstyle).
• AlbertisADF (from URW-A028), Albertis Titling.
• Ameris ADF (from URW n33012t).
• ArrosADF (from URW n021003L).
• AurelisADF (2009, almost art nouveau).
• Baskervald ADF (7 years of work according to Harendal: an alternative for New Baskerville).
• BerenisADF (2008, a didone family), BerenisNo2 (2008).
• BirkenADF (from URW-n033014t).
• ColonnadeADF (from URW-n033014t).
• EditorialisADF (from URW-n033014t).
• Electrum (like Eurostyle and URW City).
• FenelrisADF (sans).
• FrontonADF Titling (from URW-n033014t).
• GaramondeADF (from URW-g043004t), GaramondNo8ADF (from URW g043024t).
• GilliusADF and GilliusADFN (from Vera Sans, an alternative for GillSansMT).
• HelvetisADF (from URW U001).
• Ikarius (2008, semi-serif; inspired by Hypatia Sans), IkariusNo2 (2008), Ikarius-Serie (2009).
• Irianis (2008; IrianisADFMath (2009) was made for the TeX math community).
• LibrisADF (sans, patterned after Lydian).
• MekanusADF (2009, typewriter style).
• NeoGothisADF (2009).
• OldaniaADF (2009, art nouveau).
• OrnementsADF (2009).
• PalladioADFStyle (a Palatino derived from URW g043023t).
• RomandeADF (with hints of Caslon, Times and Tiffany; CTAN download).
• SwitzeraADF (derived from Vera).
• SymbolADF (2008, bullets and arrows).
• Teknis: under development.
• TribunADF (2009, like Times New Roman).
• Universalis-Std (2009, a take on Futura).
• VenturisADF, VenturisOldADF, VenturisTitlingADF and VenturisSansADF (2007: alternatives for Utopia).
• Verana Sans and Serif (from Bitstream Vera Sans and Serif).

Arkpandora
[Gavin Graham]

The author of these free fonts, Gavin Graham, writes: Many people are still getting (by whatever means) the core MS fonts for their Linux Desktop. This project is meant to be as a replacement for some of these main fonts. They have been designed to match similarly with the fonts they replace. The fonts are derived from the Bitstream Vera fonts and are available under the same terms as Vera. With this set, you get Aerial instead of Arial, Tymes instead of Times New Roman and Veranda instead of Verdana. The actual list is: Aerial, AerialBd, AerialBdIt, AerialIt, AerialMono, AerialMonoBd, AerialMonoBdIt, AerialMonoIt, Tymes, TymesBd, Veranda, VerandaBd, VerandaBdIt, VerandaIt. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ben Laenen

Antwerp, Belgium-based designer of the beautiful free musical symbols font Euterpe (2007). Alternate URL. He is also involved in the management of the DejaVu free font family. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bepa Fonts
[Danilo Segan]

Danilo Segan added Cyrillic glyphs to Bitstream's Vera sans family, and created the Bepa family. Alternate URL. Apparently, they are now outdated, having been replaced by the DejaVu Sans and Serif families. He maintains the Cyrillic glyph set in DejaVu. The URW-CYR family contains cleaned-up and fixed Serbian glyphs---these are now outdated, since Valek Filipov has merged (and first improved) them back into upstream URW-CYR fonts available here. Danilo Segan also created Nova and Nova Light (2003-2004), an art deco Cyrillic unicase family. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bera Fonts
[Malte Rosenau]

The Bera type 1 font pack comprises BeraSans-Bold, BeraSans-BoldOblique, BeraSans-Oblique, BeraSans-Roman, BeraSansMono-Bold, BeraSansMono-BoldOb, BeraSansMono-Oblique, BeraSansMono-Roman, BeraSerif-Bold, BeraSerif-Roman, all made in 2004. The developers, Malte Rosenau (University of Göttingen) and Walter Schmidt, write: The fonts were originally designed by Bitstream, Inc in TrueType format under the name "Bitstream Vera". These fonts are available from Gnome.org. Malte Rosenau converted them to the Postscript type1 format. The license required a different name ("Bera") to be assigned to the result. Ulrich Dirr (Art&Satz) reworked the kerning tables of the Bera Sans fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bitstream Vera Fonts
[Jim Lyles]

The Bitstream Gnome project has released a free no-strings-attached typeface family Vera (2003) for the Linux world. Developed by Bitstream's Jim Lyles, Vera comes in didone Serif, Sans and Sans Mono versions, with Bold, Oblique and Bold Oblique weights. The Sans Mono families have a characteristic dotted zero and an almost Z-shaped lower case l, and are in my view far from optimal. The serif fonts are a bit like Carter's Georgia.

See also here. Download also here or here. Jonathon Delacour complains about the lack of macroned characters, and compares various web browsers and font families. Alternate download site. Fontspace link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Caroline Hadilaksono

Designer currently living in Los Angeles. She graduated from Otis College of Art and Design graphic design program, with a minor in illustration, and founded the open source type cooperative The League of Movable Type with Micah Rich in 2009. Designer of Junction (2009), about which she writes: Inspired by my favorite humanist sans serif typefaces, such as Meta, Myriad, and Scala, Junction is where the best qualities of serif and sans serif typefaces come together. It has the hand drawn and human qualities of a serif, and still retains the clarity and efficiencies of a sans serif typeface. It combines the best of both worlds.

Kernest link. Klingspor link. The League of Movable Type link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dafydd Harries

Designer of the free Olwen family in 2003, about which he writes: Olwen is a family of free fonts based on the Bitstream Vera fonts. It aims to extend the coverage of the Vera fonts while remaining true to the original style. Olwen's additional glyphs have been merged into the DejaVu fonts, another extension of Vera. Olwen supports the Welsh language (accented w and y glyphs). [Google] [More]  ⦿

DejaVu Fonts
[Stepan Roh]

The DejaVu fonts form an open source font family based on the Bitstream Vera Fonts. Free download. Its purpose is to provide a wider range of characters (see Current status page for more information) while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development. Included are DejaVuSans-Bold, DejaVuSans-BoldOblique, DejaVuSans-Oblique, DejaVuSans, DejaVuSansCondensed-Bold, DejaVuSansCondensed-BoldOblique, DejaVuSansCondensed-Oblique, DejaVuSansCondensed, DejaVuSansMono-Bold, DejaVuSansMono-BoldOb, DejaVuSansMono-Oblique, DejaVuSansMono-Roman, DejaVuSerif-Bold, DejaVuSerif-BoldOblique, DejaVuSerif-Oblique, DejaVuSerif-Roman, DejaVuSerifCondensed-Bold, DejaVuSerifCondensed-BoldOblique, DejaVuSerifCondensed-Oblique, DejaVuSerifCondensed.

Authors and contributors comprise Adrian Schroeter, Ben Laenen, Dafydd Harries, Danilo Segan (Cyrillic), David Jez, David Lawrence Ramsey, Denis Jacquerye, Dwayne Bailey, James Cloos, James Crippen, Keenan Pepper, Mashrab Kuvatov, Misu Moldovan (Romanian), Ognyan Kulev, Ondrej Koala Vacha, Peter Cernák, Sander Vesik, Stepán Roh (project manager; Polish), Tavmjong Bah, Valentin Stoykov, and Vasek Stodulka. The idea is to eventually cover most of unicode. Currently, this is covered: Latin (+supplement, extended A and part of extended B), IPA, Greek, Coptic, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, Hebrew, N'ko, Tifinagh, Lao, Canadian aboriginal syllabics, Ogham, Arabic, math symbols, arrows, Braille, chess, and many dingbats.

Alternate download site. Wiki page with download information.

Fontspace link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye is the Belgian co-leader of the DejaVu font project (free fonts based on Bitstream Vera), the default GUI for fonts on several Linux OS distributions. He is working on extending various Open Source fonts to support African orthographies in Latin script. He is collaborating with a network of experts in African languages localization as part of the Pan Africa localization Network. Denis, with a Bs.C in Computer Science and a minor in Linguistics from McGill University, has experience in the Language Technology industry, Open Source software, Font Engineering and Unicode software support for African language. Speaker at ATypI 2008 in St. Petersburg on African fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Emmi Laakso

Emmi Laakso (Chicago, IL) designed Manifesto, which is a friendly, but authoritative open-source stencil typeface intended to be used by non-profit organizations and individuals to propagate sociopolitical messages in public environments. There are Manifesto Rounded and Manifesto Geometric.

Behance link/a>. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fonts Nomina Nominata

Carefully crafted page by Stefan Unterstein who lists and discusses high quality free fonts. His list:

• Adobe Utopia
• Bitstream Charter
• Bitstream Vera Sans/Mono/Serif [Gnome Desk+Webfont]
• IBM Courier
• URW Antiqua/Grotesk
• URW Ghostscript/PS Core-Fonts
• Microsoft WebFonts (Georgia, Verdana, Trebuchet)
• Monotype Arial & Andale Mono
• Linotype Digi-Antiqua/Grotesk (2)
• Gentium RU Serif Roman/Italic Unicode (by Victor Gaultney)
• Linux Libertine Serif Roman/Italic Unicode (by Philipp H. Poll).

George Williams

George Williams's site (now defunct) site was a discovery! George Williams (b. 1959) wrote spline-generating code and then went on to produce several fonts with his software between 1987 and 1998:

• Art nouveau style: Carmen, Ambrosia, Fantaisie Artistique, Baldur, Monopol, Parisian, Peignot, Bocklin, Edda.
• Lombardic: Lombardic.
• Victorian: Caprice, Ringlet.
• Uncial: Uncial Animals, Roman Uncial Modern.
• Ornamental caps: Versal, Decorative, Square Caps, Extravagant Capitals, Floral Caps, Morris, Andrade.
• Display faces: Crystal, Flash, Cupola.
• Blackletter: Rotunda (1998), Bastarda, Textura Modern, Fractur (a remake of Wittenbach).
• Art deco: Piccadilly, Mirage (1999, prismatic).
• Calligraphic: Humanistic.
• Text: Caslon.
• Slab: Monospace.
• Sans: Caliban.
• Bamboo Gothic (2007).
• TIS620-2529 (a Thai font).

George Williams writes: I have been slowly working to provide free unicode postscript fonts for the three major groupings of styles used by european (latin, greek and cyrillic anyway) type designs: serif, sans-serif and typewriter (or times, helvetica and courier). Monospace is my approximation to courier. Close examination will reveal that it is a bad copy of courier. Caslon is a serif font (designed by William Caslon in 1734), it's not a bad copy of times, it's a bad copy of something else. Caliban is a bad copy of Helvetica. If Microsoft can call their version of Helvetica Arial, then Caliban seems appropriate for mine. Alternate URL. Yet another URL.

George Williams is best known as the inventor and creator of FontForge, the bigest and best free font editor today. It made him the darling of the Open Software community. Interview with OSP. [Google] [More]  ⦿

GNU Freefont (or: Free UCS Outline Fonts)
[Steve White]

The GNU Freefont is continuously being updated to become a large useful Unicode monster. GNU FreeFont is a free family of scalable outline fonts, suitable for general use on computers and for desktop publishing. It is Unicode-encoded for compatability with all modern operating systems. There are serif, Sans and Mono subfamilies. Also called the "Free UCS Outline Fonts", this project is part of the larger Free Software Foundation. Scans: FreeMono, FreeMonoBold, FreeMonoBoldOblique, FreeMonoOblique, FreeSans, FreeSansBold, FreeSansBoldOblique, FreeSansOblique, FreeSerif, FreeSerifBold, FreeSerifBoldItalic, FreeSerifItalic. The original head honcho was Primoz Peterlin, the coordinator at the Institute of Biophysics of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2008, Steve White took over. Participants and credits, as of the end of 2010, with Unicode range responsibilities:

• URW++ Design&Development GmbH. URW++ donated a set of 35 core PostScript Type 1 fonts to the Ghostscript project.
  • Basic Latin (U+0041-U+007A)
  • Latin-1 Supplement (U+00C0-U+00FF)
  • Latin Extended-A (U+0100-U+017F)
  • Spacing Modifier Letters (U+02B0-U+02FF)
  • Mathematical Operators (U+2200-U+22FF)
  • Block Elements (U+2580-U+259F)
  • Dingbats (U+2700-U+27BF)
• Yannis Haralambous and John Plaice. Yannis Haralambous and John Plaice are the authors of Omega typesetting system, which is an extension of TeX. Its first release, aims primarily at improving TeX's multilingual abilities. In Omega all characters and pointers into data-structures are 16-bit wide, instead of 8-bit, thereby eliminating many of the trivial limitations of TeX. Omega also allows multiple input and output character sets, and uses programmable filters to translate from one encoding to another, to perform contextual analysis, etc. Internally, Omega uses the universal 16-bit Unicode standard character set, based on ISO-10646. These improvements not only make it a lot easier for TeX users to cope with multiple or complex languages, like Arabic, Indic, Khmer, Chinese, Japanese or Korean, in one document, but will also form the basis for future developments in other areas, such as native color support and hypertext features. ... Fonts for UT1 (omlgc family) and UT2 (omah family) are under development: these fonts are in PostScript format and visually close to Times and Helvetica font families.
  • Latin Extended-B (U+0180-U+024F)
  • IPA Extensions (U+0250-U+02AF)
  • Greek (U+0370-U+03FF)
  • Armenian (U+0530-U+058F)
  • Hebrew (U+0590-U+05FF)
  • Arabic (U+0600-U+06FF)
  • Currency Symbols (U+20A0-U+20CF)
  • Arabic Presentation Forms-A (U+FB50-U+FDFF)
  • Arabic Presentation Forms-B (U+FE70-U+FEFF)
• Yannis Haralambous and Wellcome Institute. In 1994, The Wellcome Library The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, England, commissioned Mr. Haralambous to produce a Sinhalese font for them. We have received 03/09 official notice from Robert Kiley, Head of e-Strategy for the Wellcome Library, that Yannis' font could be included in GNU FreeFont under its GNU license: Sinhala (U+0D80-U+0DFF).
• Young U. Ryu at the University of Texas at Dallas is the author of Txfonts, a set of mathematical symbols designed to accompany text typeset in Times or its variants. In the documentation, Young adresses the design of mathematical symbols: "The Adobe Times fonts are thicker than the CM fonts. Designing math fonts for Times based on the rule thickness of Times =,, +, /, <, etc. would result in too thick math symbols, in my opinion. In the TX fonts, these glyphs are thinner than those of original Times fonts. That is, the rule thickness of these glyphs is around 85% of that of the Times fonts, but still thicker than that of the CM fonts." Ranges: Arrows (U+2190-U+21FF), Mathematical Symbols (U+2200-U+22FF).
• Valek Filippov added Cyrillic glyphs and composite Latin Extended A to the whole set of the abovementioned URW set of 35 PostScript core fonts, Ranges: Latin Extended-A (U+0100-U+017F), Cyrillic (U+0400-U+04FF).
• Wadalab Kanji Comittee. Between April 1990 and March 1992, Wadalab Kanji Comittee put together a series of scalable font files with Japanese scripts, in four forms: Sai Micho, Chu Mincho, Cho Kaku and Saimaru. The font files were written in custom file format, while tools for conversion into Metafont and PostScript Type 1 were also supplied. The Wadalab Kanji Comittee has later been dismissed, and the resulting files can be now found on the FTP server of the Depertment of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics, Faculty of Engineering, University of Tokyo: Hiragana (U+3040-U+309F), Katakana (U+30A0-U+30FF). Note that some time around 2009, the hiragana and katakana ranges were deleted.
• Angelo Haritsis has compiled a set of Greek type 1 fonts. The glyphs from this source has been used to compose Greek glyphs in FreeSans and FreeMono. Greek (U+0370-U+03FF).
• Yannis Haralambous and Virach Sornlertlamvanich. In 1999, Yannis Haralambous and Virach Sornlertlamvanich made a set of glyphs covering the Thai national standard Nf3, in both upright and slanted shape. Range: Thai (U+0E00-U+0E7F).
• Shaheed Haque has developed a basic set of basic Bengali glyphs (without ligatures), using ISO10646 encoding. Range: Bengali (U+0980-U+09FF).
• Sam Stepanyan created a set of Armenian sans serif glyphs visually compatible with Helvetica or Arial. Range: Armenian (U+0530-U+058F).
• Mohamed Ishan has started a Thaana Unicode Project. Range: Thaana (U+0780-U+07BF).
• Sushant Kumar Dash has created a font in his mother tongue, Oriya: Oriya (U+0B00-U+0B7F). But Freefont has dropped Oriya because of the absence of font features neccessary for display of text in Oriya.
• Harsh Kumar has started BharatBhasha for these ranges:
  • Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F)
  • Bengali (U+0980-U+09FF)
  • Gurmukhi (U+0A00-U+0A7F)
  • Gujarati (U+0A80-U+0AFF)
• Prasad A. Chodavarapu created Tikkana, a Telugu font family: Telugu (U+0C00-U+0C7F). It was originally included in GNU Freefont, but supoort for Telugu was later dropped altogether from the GNU Freefont project.
• Frans Velthuis and Anshuman Pandey. In 1991, Frans Velthuis from the Groningen University, The Netherlands, released a Devanagari font as Metafont source, available under the terms of GNU GPL. Later, Anshuman Pandey from Washington University in Seattle, took over the maintenance of font. Fonts can be found on CTAN. This font was converted the font to Type 1 format using Peter Szabo's TeXtrace and removed some redundant control points with PfaEdit. Range: Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F).
• Hardip Singh Pannu. In 1991, Hardip Singh Pannu has created a free Gurmukhi TrueType font, available as regular, bold, oblique and bold oblique form. Range: Gurmukhi (U+0A00-U+0A7F).
• Jeroen Hellingman (The Netherlands) created a set of Malayalam metafonts in 1994, and a set of Oriya metafonts in 1996. Malayalam fonts were created as uniform stroke only, while Oriya metafonts exist in both uniform and modulated stroke. From private communication: "It is my intention to release the fonts under GPL, but not all copies around have this notice on them." Metafonts can be found here and here. Ranges: Oriya (U+0B00-U+0B7F), Malayalam (U+0D00-U+0D7F). Oriya was subsequently dropped from the Freefont project.
• Thomas Ridgeway, then at the Humanities And Arts Computing Center, Washington University, Seattle, USA, (now defunct), created a Tamil metafont in 1990. Anshuman Pandey from the same university took over the maintenance of font. Fonts can be found at CTAN and cover Tamil (U+0B80-U+0BFF).
• Berhanu Beyene, Prof. Dr. Manfred Kudlek, Olaf Kummer, and Jochen Metzinger from the Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science, University of Hamburg, prepared a set of Ethiopic metafonts. They also maintain the home page on the Ethiopic font project. Someone converted the fonts to Type 1 format using TeXtrace, and removed some redundant control points with PfaEdit. Range: Ethiopic (U+1200-U+137F).
• Maxim Iorsh. In 2002, Maxim Iorsh started the Culmus project, aiming at providing Hebrew-speaking Linux and Unix community with a basic collection of Hebrew fonts for X Windows. The fonts are visually compatible with URW++ Century Schoolbook L, URW++ Nimbus Sans L and URW++ Nimbus Mono L families, respectively. Range: Hebrew (U+0590-U+05FF).
• Vyacheslav Dikonov made a Braille unicode font that could be merged with the UCS fonts to fill the 2800-28FF range completely (uniform scaling is possible to adapt it to any cell size). He also contributed a free Syriac font, whose glyphs (about half of them) are borrowed from the free Carlo Ator font. Vyacheslav also filled in a few missing spots in the U+2000-U+27FF area, e.g., the box drawing section, sets of subscript and superscript digits and capital Roman numbers. Ranges: Syriac (U+0700-U+074A), Box Drawing (U+2500-U+257F), Braille (U+2800-U+28FF).
• Panayotis Katsaloulis helped fixing Greek accents in the Greek Extended area: (U+1F00-U+1FFF).
• M.S. Sridhar. M/S Cyberscape Multimedia Limited, Mumbai, developers of Akruti Software for Indian Languages (http://www.akruti.com/), have released a set of TTF fonts for nine Indian scripts (Devanagari, Gujarati, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Oriya, and Gurumukhi) under the GNU General Public License (GPL). You can download the fonts from the Free Software Foundation of India WWW site. Their original contributions to Freefont were
  • Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F)
  • Bengali (U+0980-U+09FF)
  • Gurmukhi (U+0A00-U+0A7F)
  • Gujarati (U+0A80-U+0AFF)
  • Oriya (U+0B00-U+0B7F)
  • Tamil (U+0B80-U+0BFF)
  • Telugu (U+0C00-U+0C7F)
  • Kannada (U+0C80-U+0CFF)
  • Malayalam (U+0D00-U+0D7F)
  Oriya, Kannada and Telugu were dropped from the GNU Freefont project.
• DMS Electronics, The Sri Lanka Tipitaka Project, and Noah Levitt. Noah Levitt found out that the Sinhalese fonts available on the site metta.lk are released under GNU GPL. These glyphs were later replaced by those from the LKLUG font. Finally the range was completely replaced by glyphs from the sinh TeX font, with much help and advice from Harshula Jayasuriya. Range: Sinhala (U+0D80-U+0DFF).
• Daniel Shurovich Chirkov. Dan Chirkov updated the FreeSerif font with the missing Cyrillic glyphs needed for conformance to Unicode 3.2. The effort is part of the Slavjanskij package for Mac OS X. range: Cyrillic (U+0400-U+04FF).
• Abbas Izad. Responsible for Arabic (U+0600-U+06FF), Arabic Presentation Forms-A, (U+FB50-U+FDFF), Arabic Presentation Forms-B (U+FE70-U+FEFF).
• Denis Jacquerye added new glyphs and corrected existing ones in the Latin Extended-B (U+0180-U+024F) and IPA Extensions (U+0250-U+02AF) ranges.
• K.H. Hussain and R. Chitrajan. `Rachana' in Malayalam means `to write', `to create'. Rachana Akshara Vedi, a team of socially committed information technology professionals and philologists, has applied developments in computer technology and desktop publishing to resurrect the Malayalam language from the disorder, fragmentation and degeneration it had suffered since the attempt to adapt the Malayalam script for using with a regular mechanical typewriter, which took place in 1967-69. K.H. Hussein at the Kerala Forest Research Institute has released "Rachana Normal" fonts with approximately 900 glyphs required to typeset traditional Malayalam. R. Chitrajan apparently encoded the glyphs in the OpenType table. In 2008, the Malayalam ranges in FreeSerif were updated under the advise and supervision of Hiran Venugopalan of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, to reflect the revised edition Rachana_04. Range: Malayalam (U+0D00-U+0D7F).
• Solaiman Karim filled in Bengali (U+0980-U+09FF). Solaiman Karim has developed several OpenType Bangla fonts and released them under GNU GPL.
• Sonali Sonania and Monika Shah covered Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F) and Gujarati (U+0A80-U+0AFF). Glyphs were drawn by Cyberscape Multimedia Ltd., #101, Mahalakshmi Mansion 21st Main 22nd "A" Cross Banashankari 2nd stage Banglore 560070, India. Converted to OTF by IndicTrans Team, Powai, Mumbai, lead by Prof. Jitendra Shah. Maintained by Monika Shah and Sonali Sonania of janabhaaratii Team, C-DAC, Mumbai. This font is released under GPL by Dr. Alka Irani and Prof Jitendra Shah, janabhaaratii Team, C-DAC, Mumabi. janabhaaratii is localisation project at C-DAC Mumbai (formerly National Centre for Software Technology); funded by TDIL, Govt. of India.
• Pravin Satpute, Bageshri Salvi, Rahul Bhalerao and Sandeep Shedmake added these Indic language cranges:
  • Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F)
  • Gujarati (U+0A80-U+0AFF)
  • Oriya (U+0B00-U+0B7F)
  • Malayalam (U+0D00-U+0D7F)
  • Tamil (U+0B80-U+0BFF)
  In December 2005 the team at www.gnowledge.org released a set of two Unicode pan-Indic fonts: "Samyak" and "Samyak Sans". "Samyak" font belongs to serif style and is an original work of the team; "Samyak Sans" font belongs to sans serif style and is actually a compilation of already released Indic fonts (Gargi, Padma, Mukti, Utkal, Akruti and ThendralUni). Both fonts are based on Unicode standard. You can download the font files separately. Note that Oriya was dropped from the Freefont project.
• Kulbir Singh Thind added Gurmukhi (U+0A00-U+0A7F). Dr. Kulbir Singh Thind designed a set of Gurmukhi Unicode fonts, AnmolUni and AnmolUni-Bold, which are available under the terms of GNU license from the Punjabu Computing Resource Center.
• Gia Shervashidze added Georgian (U+10A0-U+10FF). Starting in mid-1990s, Gia Shervashidze designed many Unicode-compliant Georgian fonts: Times New Roman Georgian, Arial Georgian, Courier New Georgian.
• Daniel Johnson. Created by hand a Cherokee range specially for FreeFont to be "in line with the classic Cherokee typefaces used in 19th century printing", but also to fit well with ranges previously in FreeFont. Then he made Unified Canadian Syllabics in Sans, and a Cherokee and Kayah Li in Mono! And never to be outdone by himself, then did UCAS Extended and Osmanya.... What next?
  • Armenian (serif) (U+0530-U+058F)
  • Cherokee (U+13A0-U+13FF)
  • Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (U+1400-U+167F)
  • UCAS Extended (U+18B0-U+18F5)
  • Kayah Li (U+A900-U+A92F)
  • Tifinagh (U+2D30-U+2D7F)
  • Vai (U+A500-U+A62B)
  • Latin Extended-D (Mayanist letters) (U+A720-U+A7FF)
  • Osmanya (U+10480-U+104a7)
• George Douros, the creator of several fonts focusing on ancient scripts and symbols. Many of the glyphs are created by making outlines from scanned images of ancient sources.
  • Aegean: Phoenecian (U+10900-U+1091F).
  • Analecta: Gothic (U+10330-U+1034F)
  • Musical: Byzantine (U+1D000-U+1D0FF)&Western (U+1D100-U+1D1DF)
  • Unicode: many miscellaneous symbols, miscellaneous technical, supplemental symbols, and mathematical alphanumeric symbols (U+1D400-U+1D7FF), Mah Jong (U+1F000-U+1F02B), and the outline of the domino (U+1F030-U+1F093).
• Steve White filled in a lot of missing characters, got some font features working, left fingerprints almost everywhere, and is responsible for these blocks: Glagolitic (U+2C00-U+2C5F), Coptic (U+2C80-U+2CFF).
• Pavel Skrylev is responsible for Cyrillic Extended-A (U+2DEO-U+2DFF) as well as many of the additions to Cyrillic Extended-B (U+A640-U+A65F).
• Mark Williamson made the MPH 2 Damase font, from which these ranges were taken:
  • Hanunóo (U+1720-U+173F)
  • Buginese (U+1A00-U+1A1F)
  • Tai Le (U+1950-U+197F)
  • Ugaritic (U+10380-U+1039F)
  • Old Persian (U+103A0-U+103DF)
• Primoz Peterlin filled in missing glyphs here and there (e.g., Latin Extended-B and IPA Extensions ranges in the FreeMono family), and created the following UCS blocks:
  • Latin Extended-B (U+0180-U+024F)
  • IPA Extensions (U+0250-U+02AF)
  • Arrows (U+2190-U+21FF)
  • Box Drawing (U+2500-U+257F)
  • Block Elements (U+2580-U+259F)
  • Geometrical Shapes (U+25A0-U+25FF)
• Jacob Poon submitted a very thorough survey of glyph problems and other suggestions.
• Alexey Kryukov made the TemporaLCGUni fonts, based on the URW++ fonts, from which at one point FreeSerif Cyrillic, and some of the Greek, was drawn. He also provided valuable direction about Cyrillic and Greek typesetting.
• The Sinhala font project has taken the glyphs from Yannis Haralambous' Sinhala font, to produce a Unicode TrueType font, LKLUG. These glyphs were for a while included in FreeFont: Sinhala (U+0D80-U+0DFF).

Fontspace link. Download link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Jim Lyles

Bitstream designer (b. 1955) who lives in Michigan City, IN. At Bitstream, he does in-house work, and has his signature on Candy Bits (1996, an M&M simulation font), Prima Sans (1998), Prima Serif (1998), Prima Sans Monospace (Bitstream, with Sue Zafarana, 1998) and Bitstream Vera (2003). According to Lyles, Bitstream Vera is actually a detuned Bitstream Prima. Gnome asked that we modify some of the characters in the monospace, particularly for coding legibility. We added a center dot to the zero and modified the lcase l to distinquish it from the figure one. Although I designed Vera (Prima), it was actually Sue Zafarana who adapted it to a mono version, at times a very challenging task. The Vera fonts are also here. Vera Sans is at the basis of Menlo (2009), a Snow Leopard system font, about which Apple writes: Apple's Menlo is based upon the Open Source font Bitstream Vera and the public domain font Deja Vu.

He revived some Filmotype fonts from the 1950s: Filmotype Reef (2011), Filmotype MacBeth (2007), and Filmotype Austin (2009, brush face).

Another MyFonts link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Large Unicode fonts
[Alan Wood]

Alan Wood lists and discusses the main free Unicode fonts. As of 2010, these include:

• AbRomanSerif (3805 glyphs, Language Geek).
• Alphabetum (5444 glyphs, by Juan José Marcos). For classical and mediaeval Latin, classical Greek, Coptic, Old and Middle English, and Sanskrit, but also includes characters for most Latin-based European languages and Esperanto.
• Andika Basic (838 glyphs, SIL).
• Andron Scriptor Web (1600 glyphs, Medieval Unicode Fiont Initiative).
• Arev Sans (2851 glyphs, arev Fonts): based on Bitstream Vera Sans.
• Arial (3381 glyphs, Microsoft).
• Arial Unicode MS (50377 glyphs, Microsoft). Supplied with Microsoft Office 2002 (XP) and Microsoft Office 2003.
• Berling Antiqua (842 glyphs).
• Caslon (3551 glyphs, George Williams).
• Charis SIL (4661 glyphs, SIL) .
• Chrysanthi Unicode (4383 glyphs) .
• CN-Arial (3069 glyphs, Chan-Nguyen).
• CN-Times (2866 glyphs, Chan-Nguyen).
• Code2000 (63546 glyphs, James Kass).
• Courier New (3151 glyphs). Supplied with Microsoft Windows Vista.
• DejaVu Sans (5466 glyphs). Based on Bitstream Vera Sans.
• DejaVu Sans Condensed (5466 glyphs).
• DejaVu Sans Mono (3169 glyphs). Based on Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.
• DejaVu Serif (3064 glyphs). Based on Bitstream Vera Serif.
• DejaVu Serif Condensed (3064 glyphs).
• Dialekt Uni (1400 glyphs). Mainly for phoentics.
• Doulos SIL (4661 glyphs, SIL).
• e-PhonTranslit UNI (684 glyphs). Supplied withthe Indolipi package.
• EversonMono (6396 glyphs, Michael Everson).
• Fixedsys Excelsior 3.01 (5993 glyphs).
• Free Idg Serif (6256 glyphs).
• Free Monospaced (2560 glyphs).
• Free Sans (3999 glyphs).
• Free Serif (7971 glyphs).
• Frutiger Linotype (840 glyphs, Linotype). Supplied with Microsoft Reader.
• Gandhari Unicode (2265 glyphs, Andrew Glass). Designed for romanisation of Sanskrit and Gandhari.
• Garava (1319 glyphs, Michael Best).
• Gentium (1699 glyphs, Victor Gaultney, SIL).
• GentiumAlt (1699 glyphs, Victor Gaultney, SIL).
• Hindsight Unicode (2894 glyphs, Darren Rigby).
• jGaramond (1849 glyphs).
• Junicode (3096 glyphs, Peter S. Baker). Intended for mediaevalists.
• Kliment Std (2849 glyphs, Kodeks).
• Kurdish AllAlphabets (694 glyphs, Ernst Tremel). Intended for Kurdish.
• LeedsUni (2976 glyphs, Alec McAllister).
• Legendum (1151 glyphs).
• Linux Biolinum O (2418 glyphs, Libertine Open Fonts Project).
• Linux Libertine O (2432 glyphs, Libertine Open Fonts Project).
• Lucida Bright (1402 glyphs). Supplied with Java Runtime 1.4.2.
• Lucida Grande (2826 glyphs). Supplied with Apple - Safari 3 Public Beta.
• Lucida Sans (Java) (2929 glyphs). Supplied with Java Runtime 1.4.2.
• Lucida Sans (Star Office) (2094 glyphs). Supplied with Sun’s StarOffice 5.2 for Windows.
• Lucida Sans Typewriter (Java) (1376 glyphs). Supplied with Java Runtime 1.4.2.
• Lucida Sans Typewriter (Star Office) (1142 glyphs). Supplied with Sun's StarOffice 5.2 for Windows.
• Lucida Sans Unicode (1779 glyphs). Supplied with Microsoft Windows Vista
• Marin (3566 glyphs).
• MD King KhammuRabi (1296 glyphs, Michael Davodian). Mainly for Assyrian, Aramaic, Caldean, Soryoyo, Ashoraya.
• Microsoft Sans Serif (3053 glyphs, Microsoft). Supplied with Windows Vista. Version 1.41 (2301 characters, 2257 glyphs) was supplied with Windows XP SP2. Version 1.02 (1090 glyphs) was supplied with Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
• Minion Pro (1663 glyphs, Adobe). Supplied with Adobe Reader 7.
• Monospace (2862 glyphs, George Williams).
• MPH 2B Damase (2895 glyphs, Mark Williamson).
• MS Reference Sans Serif (1193 glyphs). Supplied with Microsoft Encarta.
• MS Reference Serif (1135 glyphs). Supplied with Microsoft Encarta.
• Myriad Pro (834 glyphs, Adobe). Supplied with Adobe Reader 7.
• Quivira (7742 glyphs, Alexander Lange).
• Reader Sans (1291 glyphs).
• RomanCyrillic Std (3450 glyphs, Kodeks). Also known as CampusRoman Std.
• Roman Unicode (3923 glyphs).
• Rupakara (394 glyphs, Michael Everson).
• Summersby (1010 glyphs).
• Tahoma (3301 glyphs, Microsoft). Supplied with Microsoft Windows Vista.
• Thryomanes (1472 glyphs, Herman Miller). Mainly for old Greek.
• Times New Roman (3380 glyphs). Supplied with Microsoft Windows Vista. Version 2.82 (1170 characters) was supplied with Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
• TITUS Cyberbit Basic (10044 glyphs).
• Verajja (1264 glyphs, Michael Best).
• Verdana (911 glyphs, Microsoft). Supplied with Microsoft Windows Vista. Version 2.35 (680 characters) was supplied with Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

• Bitstream Inc.
• DYNALAB Inc.
• HermesSOFT Company
• Monotype
• Production First Software

Liberation Fonts

A set of free fonts developed by Ascender Corp for Red Hat Linux. They state: On May 9, 2007, Red Hat announced the public release of these fonts under the trademark LIBERATION at the Red Hat Summit. There are three sets: Sans (a substitute for Arial, Albany, Helvetica, Nimbus Sans L, and Bitstream Vera Sans), Serif (a substitute for Times New Roman, Thorndale, Nimbus Roman, and Bitstream Vera Serif) and Mono (a substitute for Courier New, Cumberland, Courier, Nimbus Mono L, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono). The list: Liberation-Mono-Bold, Liberation-Mono-Bold-Italic, Liberation-Mono-Italic, Liberation-Mono, Liberation-Sans-Bold, Liberation-Sans-Bold-Italic, Liberation-Sans-Italic, Liberation-Sans, Liberation-Serif-Bold, Liberation-Serif-Bold-Italic, Liberation-Serif-Italic, Liberation-Serif. Direct download. Dafont link. One more URL. Kernest states that these fonts were designed by Steve Matteson and Caius Chance. But I believe that they were all derived from public fonts b\kie the Bitstream Vera series and some public URW fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Libertine Open Fonts Project
[Philipp H. Poll]

Now, here is a project with a name I like! This project by Philipp H. Poll has been started in order to create fonts that can be released under the GNU Public License. As of early 2005, we have the following Times New Roman lookalikes: LLibertineCaps, LinLibertine, LinLibertine-Italic, LinLibertineBd. Libertine Grotesque is next on the list of things to do. The fonts come in truetype and fontforge (SFD) text formats. Linux Libertine covers a big range of Unicode, including all characters in MES-1 (Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, Frensh, Frisian, Galician, German, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish Gaelic (new orthography), Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxemburgish, Maltese, Manx Gaelic, Moldavian (with restrictions), Northern Sámi, Norwegian, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian (with restrictions), Scottish Gaelic, Slovak, Slovenian, Lower Sorbian, Upper Sorbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Welsh (with restrictions)), IPA, Greek, Cyrillic, math symbols, and a host of other symbol and language sets. TeX archive. The typophiles are not impressed. Charles Ellertson writes: The bowl of the "a" doesn't fit other letters, the top and terminal of the "f" doesn't know where it is going, the descender of the "y" doesn't balance quite right, and the serif on the upper arm of the "z" (which probably reminded the original poster of Caslon) seems out of place. I get the impression, again from the small sample, that the font doesn't quite know whether it is supposed to be slightly condensed or slightly expanded.

In 2007, the following weights are available: Normal, Kursiv, Fett, Fett Kursiv, Kapitaelchen, Unterstrichen, Grotesk. As a measure of the success of the font, we find that is now used on the logo of Wikipedia.

As a companion font, they offer Linux Biolinum (2010): The Biolinum is an organic sans-serif and could be also described as organogrotesque (non-linear sans serif). It is still in a beta stage. Biolinum is meant for emphasizing titles but could be used also for short passages of text. For longer texts a serif font such as the Libertine should be used in favour of readability The Biolinum has the same vertical metrics and visual weight as the Libertine, so that it fits perfectly to the Libertine and can be also used for emphasizing within the body text.

Dafont link. Fontspace link. CTAN link for Libertineotf. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ludivine Loiseau

Born in Besançon, France, in 1983, Ludivine graduated from Ecole Estienne in Paris in 2006 and now lives and works in Brussels as a freelance graphic artist and illustrator for the Speculoos agency. Font creations include the handwritten Alphajet (2005) and the Ethiopian/Latin/Turkish/Hebrew mixed experimental font Kassidy. In 2008, she made NotCourier Sans (Open Font Library, a free typewriter family based on Nimbus Mono; Cyrillic glyphs added by Valek Filippov).

Kernest link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Mihail Bayaryn

Designer in 2005 of the Hindi fonts Chandas and Uttara. Latin and Cyrillic glyphs were added from DejaVu font and modified according to GPL by Dharmo Raksati Raksitah. I quote: The font contains 4347 glyphs: 325 half-forms, 960 half-forms context-variations, 2743 ligature-signs. It is designed especially for Vedic and Classical Sanskrit but can also be used for Hindi, Nepali and other modern Indian languages. The font includes Vedic accents and many additional signs and provides maximal support for Devanagari script. In version 1.1 were added Latin and Cyrillic characters and corresponding Open Type tables for Sanskrit transliteration. Chandas font represents Southern (most commonly used today) style of Devanagari script. And Uttara font represents Northern style of Devanagari Script. These styles are sometimes also called Bombay (Southern, contemporary) and Calcutta (Northern, old) pen families accordingly. Uttara is today the only Devanagari OTF font which supports Northern variations in simple glyphs and in ligatures. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Nathan Willis

Designer of the free font News Cycle (2011, OFL), a sans face that can be downloaded at Google Font Directory. News Cycle is a realist sans-serif font family based on specimens of the 1908 News Gothic typeface from ATF.

Della Respira (2012, Google Web Fonts) is a revival of the Della Robbia typeface by American Type Founders (ATF). The source files are here.

Open Font Library link. Klingspor link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

New Typography
[Vernon Adams]

Vernon Adams (born England, 1967) is a furniture restorer, woodcarver and typeface designer. New Typography is his type design site. Vernon graduated in 2007 with an MA in type design from the University of Reading. Fontspace link. Google Plus link. Fontsquirrel link. Klingspor link.

He developed Mako (2007), a type family for text and image in magazines. Earlier, he created AutoPacHousehold. Nobile (2010) is part of the Google font directory. Through the Open Font Library, one can get the source Fontforge code for this open source sans family. About Mako, he writes that he submitted the font to Fontsmith, which sat on it for a while and rejected it, only to publish a few weeks later Lurpak, which according to Vernon is too similar to his rejected design. Free fonts at Google Code by Vernon, as of the end of 2010 include Coda (a heavy elliptical face), Nobile (mentioned above), Corben (a curvy bold face in the style of Cooper Black), and Gruppo (a thin sans).

In 2011, he added Coustard (a slab serif family), Damion (connected signage script), Smythe (Victorian), Radley (display face), Oswald (a reowking of the Alternate Gothic style), Candal (sans), Pacifico (connected signage face), Bangers (comic book face), Anton (heavy sans), Bevan (a reworking of Beton, a traditional slab serif display typeface created by Heinrich Jost in the 1930s), Six Caps (a condensed headline face), Meddon (a display font created from the handwritten script of an Eighteenth century legal document), Rokkitt (an Egyptian), Paytone One (headline face), Holtwood One SC (wood block simulation face), Monofett (white on black), Carter One (casual face), Francois One (gothic sans), Sigmar One (think mid twentieth century pulp magazine advertising), Bigshot One, Metrophobic, Mako, Francois One, Nunito (rounded), Shanti, Sigmar, Muli (minimalist sans), Kameron (an Egyptian), Stardos Stencil, Bowlby One, Bowlby One SC (fat poster face), Tienne (serif), Monoton (a multiline face in the style of Koch's Prisma, 1931), Sancreek (emulating an ornamental wood font), Amatic SC (handprinted poster family), Sancreek (a Tuscan face), Oswald (in the old Alternate Gothic tradition of sans faces), Rammetto (based on the Stephenson Blake uppercase display font Basuto, released in 1926), and Michroma (modeled after Microgramma).

Typefaces made in 2012 include Oxygen (a sans face available from Google Web Fonts), Norican (free script font at Google Web Fonts based in part on Stephenson Blake's Glenmoy from the 1920s), Cutive (free at Google Web Fonts, based on the IBM typewriter faces Executive and Smith-Premier), Pontano Sans (Google Web Fonts: a light basic sans), Trocchi (Google Web Fonts: derived from Nebiolo's Egiziano, and Caslon & Co's Antique No.4 and Ionic No.2). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Open Source Fonts
[Abhijit Nadgouda]

A discusion of and links to open source fonts, organized by Abhijit Nadgouda. It recommends these free font families for web use: Gentium, Bitstream Vera, Deja Vu, Charis SIL, Andika, Inconsolata, Utopia, MgOpen. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Open Source Publishing (or: OSP)
[Harrisson]

Free software project based in Belgium and run by four people (and I quote from their web page):

• Harrisson: Graphic designer and typographer, based in Liege and Brussels. Started to use as much Open Source software as possible on his Macintosh, as part of a research project The Tomorrow Book at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.
• Pierre Huyghebaert: Exploring for eighteen years several practices around graphic design, he currently drives his own studio Speculoos. Interested to use free sofware to re-learn to work in others way and collaboratively on cartography, type design, web interface, schematic illustration, teaching and book design.
• Nicolas Malevé: Systems- and software developer from Brussels with a long interest in the politics and practice of software. Uses Linux since 1998 and makes publishing- and distribution systems for collaborative work.
• Femke Snelting: Graphic designer and artist based in Brussels. Most of her current work is for the web. Recently switched to Linux after using Apple Macintosh for more than ten years.

• Alfphabet (2009). Based on the Belgian road signage system in use from 1945-1975. It came from Minneapolis to Brussels with 3M.
• Broodthaers.
• Cimatics (2009). Totally experimental. This font was designed in July 2009, for the graphic identity of Cimatics A\V Platform. It gathers glyphs from FreeSerif, FreeSerifItalic, DejaVuSans, DejaVuSerif, the OSP_frog mascot, the Cimatics two piece heart, a baronchon_palm_tree from Open Clip Art Library and private use dingbats drawn for Cimatics (Cimatics_scare_eye, white_pentagon).
• Crickx. A digital reinterpretation of a set of adhesive letters.
• Distilled Spirit and Whisky Jazz. In September 2009, Harrisson and Jean Baptiste Parre from LPDME remixed URW Gothic (Avant Garde) and published the free fonts Distilled Spirit and Whisky Jazz.
• DLF. DLF stands for Dingbats Liberation Fest.
• Libertinage. In August 2008, Harrisson designed 26 variations on Philipp H. Poll's 2006 font Libertine, and called the new family Libertinage.
• Limousine. This font was made for a poster to support nine people accused of "criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity". They were arrested the 11th of November 2008, in France. They and others are the victims of a witch-hunt where the word "terrorism" was applied to any idea or practice which challenges the status quo. An international movement is emerging in their support. For the poster, we re-mixed an open font, the Free Sans from Free UCS Outline Fonts.
• Logisoso. Logisoso is a reinterpretation of the Delhaize logo lettering.
• NotCourierSans. NotCourierSans is a reinterpretation of Nimbus Mono and was designed in Wroclaw at the occasion of Linux Graphics Meeting (LGM 2008). We took Nimbus as the base of the design. We proceeded to remove the serifs with raw cuts. We did not soften the edges. We are not here to be polite.
• OSP-DIN (2009). The first cut of OSP-DIN was drawn for the festival Cinema du réel.
• Polsku Regula (2010). Polsku Regula is inspired by polish signage, street signs and shop windows lettering.
• Reglo (2011) was used for the new identity of Radio Panik.
• Sans Guilt (2011). The three Sans Guilt fonts have been produced during "Read The Fucking Manual", an OSP workshop at Deparment 21 (Royal College of Art), using Gimp, Fonzie and Fontforge. They are different versions of Gill Sans based on three different sources. Sans Guilt MB: based on a rasterized pdf made with the Monotype Gill Sans delivered with Mac OSX. Sans Guilt DB: Based on early sketches by Eric Gill Sans Guilt LB: Based on lead type from Royal College of Arts letterpress workshop.
• Univers Else. A geometric sans, about which they write: Different scans were assembled by Grégoire Vigneron following different grids. These huge bitmaps were processed with appropriate potrace settings by the Fonzie software* through a .ufo font format as a working format, and an OpenType as output. Some testing and fine-tuning was done by Pierre Marchand, Delphine Platteeuw and Pierre Huyghebaert in FontForge and the font was ready, in a finished state enough to typeset the book. The oblique versions was simply slanted on the fly.
• VJ12 (2009).
• W Droge. In 2008, they ran a workshop in Wroclaw, Poland, to design a font in a day with the free tools Inkscape, Gimp and FontForge---called W Droge. It was based on Polish traffic signs. Cooperation with Dave Crossland, Alexandre Prokoudine and Nicolas Spalinger.

OSP

OSP stands for Open Source Publishing (Design Tools for Designers). It is a blog and a news site. [Google] [More]  ⦿

OSP and Monotype: An open letter

On April 9, 2011, the people at OSP, an open source foundry in Brussels, sent an open letter to Monotype in which they ask for permission to use the digital data of Gill Sans to make a reiniterpretation called Sans Guilt. See also here. We are all waiting for Monotype's reply. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Sebastien Sanfilippo

Brussels-based creator of Polsku Regula (2010, Open Font Library). He also made Reglo (2012, free at OSP).

Behance link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

The League of Movable Type
[Caroline Hadilaksono]

Another cooperative where one can submit open source fonts. Initial contributors in 2009 are Micah Rich, Caroline Hadilaksono, Haley Fiege, and Andrea Bergamini. The project was started by Micah Rich and Caroline Hadilaksono. Their manifesto: As designers on the web, we have a calling to raise the standards of the web-design world. We're not the only ones who value good design, and it's time for the web world to catch up with it. We understand the challenges that comes with the internet, but with our recent discovery of @font-face, we started getting excited. For those who aren't up to speed, @font-face is a fairly new addition to web styling, letting a designer specify the location of their own font files. Instead of having to design with just a handful of web-friendly fonts, we'll be able to use any typeface we desire. Well, that's our vision, anyway. There are people who design typefaces for a living, and we want them to make money off of something that they do well. This revolution is not a movement against type foundries and type designers; it's quite the opposite. The kind of revolution we want is a change in the way people think about doing business. We want type foundries and typographers to start thinking, "Maybe there's nothing wrong with giving things away sometimes." It's not always about the money, sometimes it's also about making a contribution to the society, in this case, the design community. Giving one typeface away for free will most likely only boost sales, and it's a good deed. We want more people to look at it like that: like they have a responsibility to do something good for their peers. We're not asking type designers and type foundries to sacrifice profit, we're asking them to contribute to a greater cause, to create a community where we not only have a high design standard for print and web alike, but also a community where we're able to share our creations, knowledge, and expertise with our peers and the world. Blog.

In-house free font creations include League Gothic (2009) [League Gothic is a revival of an old classic, and one of our favorite typefaces, Alternate Gothic No.1. It was originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton for the American Type Founders Company (ATF) in 1903. The company went bankrupt in 1993. And since the original typeface was created before 1923, the typeface is in the public domain.] [Google] [More]  ⦿

The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary

Developers with Bitstream of this family of fonts in 2003: Lynn-Sans-Bold, Lynn-Sans-Bold-Italic, Lynn-Sans-Italic, Lynn-Sans, Lynn-Sans-Mono-Bold, Lynn-Sans-Mono-Bold-Italic, Lynn-Sans-Mono-Italic, Lynn-Sans-Mono, Lynn-Serif-Bold, Lynn-Serif-Bold-Italic, Lynn-Serif-Italic, Lynn-Serif. Apparently, these are all based on Bitstream Vera. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Vangelis Karageorgos

Xanthi, Greece-based designer Vangelis Karageorgos grew up between Grevena and Larisa, in northern Greece. In 2003 he completed his studies on Environmental Engineering at the Polytechnic of Democritus University of Thrace and is currently (2007) carrying out a PhD on atmospheric chemistry and physics in Xanthi, Greece. At Parachute, he created PFMuse and PFArmonia (2007), his first commercial typefaces. PF Muse was withdrawn in 2008 as a reaction to comments by the typophiles (being too close to its genetic parent, Delicious, by Jos Buivenga). He also created Morpheus Hellenic (2006; see also here), a Greek version of Eric Oehler's famous Morpheus font from 1996. He is also working on a Greek version of the DejaVu fonts (2006). Comments on typophile. He works at the University of Thrace, Greece. Alternate URL. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Wikipedia: Open Source Font

A German wiki entry on Open Source fonts, listing Bitstream Vera, Caslon Roman, Computer Modern, DejaVu, Gentium, GNU Unifont, Junicode, Liberation fonts, Linux Libertine, MPH 2B Damase. [Google] [More]  ⦿