September 9th, 2010 byIn this latest post discussing development of the Ubuntu family of fonts, Bruno discusses scope, charactersets and what’s coming as part of the Ubuntu typeface.
Where do you begin, where do you stop? In the case of the Ubuntu font project, the second part of the question is easily answered – when all the glyphs are designed to cover our planet’s languages and other, more specialised needs. But how much do you begin with, to offer a comprehensive tool to the user base.
When we design fonts for our corporate clients we normally offer a Latin A Extended characterset which is sufficient for pretty much all their needs. However, the Ubuntu font project is not your bog standard corporate project but instead the fonts are used by a wide community. Accordingly, we felt that the Latin also needed to include the B Extended part supporting less common languages. When defining the initial scope of the project we also suggested that Greek and Cyrillic need to be available, in part because of their close relationship with Latin. The initial font release in Ubuntu 10.10 will contain Latin A+B Extended, Greek Polytonic and Cyrillic Extended. For Greek, we normally only create a Monotonic setup but we wanted to ensure that the fonts could instantly be used within the Greek academic environment allowing classic texts to be set. Eventually, all 13 font styles will have this language coverage as a minimum. Arabic and Hebrew will also become part of the for core font set, and whilst we have not got any other scripts planned we are starting to define design parameters for Devanagari, although that is not part of our initial brief for the Ubuntu font suite.
Not every language using one of the above scripts will be covered – we are aware of that and are currently collecting your comments to this respect, and for the fonts to be updated in the future. We are discussing with the Canonical design team how this is best achieved ensuring the design and technical quality of the fonts is maintained. I hope to give you more info on this during the forthcoming UDS in Orlando.
Bruno Maag
The toolkit
10 Responseshide comments
So the fond is going into Maverick by default after all?
Yes, would be good to know: will it still come for maverick?
The font is still on track for release with Ubuntu 10.10. The trouble with releasing a beta version of a font is that it doesn’t tend to stay used only for testing, but is misused as well.
We can see this already in that a small section of the very early font was already extracted by a PDF and distributed. That font is very poor quality and users complained about it. Of course, it has almost nothing in common with the actual font which is looking quite nice these days.
Of course, the other issue is that Canonical doesn’t “own” the font until version 1.0, either, but the font is still expected in Ubuntu on October 10th. Hopefully it’ll be available in the maverick beta before then.
Do you already know what the license of the font will be?
Great to see all the work done to reach beyond the Latin/Roman boundaries
Currently the Regular font available through https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-typeface-interest has a total of 1242 glyphs and the following character coverage per Unicode block:
Alphabetic Presentation Forms: 5/80 (6.25%)
Basic Latin: 100/128 (78.12%)
Combining Diacritical Marks: 1/112 (0.89%)
Currency Symbols: 3/48 (6.25%)
Cyrillic: 214/256 (83.59%)
General Punctuation: 17/112 (15.18%)
Geometric Shapes: 1/96 (1.04%)
Greek Extended: 233/256 (91.02%)
Greek and Coptic: 71/144 (49.31%)
IPA Extensions: 1/96 (1.04%)
Latin Extended Additional: 8/256 (3.12%)
Latin Extended-A: 128/128 (100.00%)
Latin Extended-B: 208/208 (100.00%)
Latin-1 Supplement: 96/128 (75.00%)
Letterlike Symbols: 5/80 (6.25%)
Mathematical Operators: 14/256 (5.47%)
Number Forms: 12/64 (18.75%)
Private Use Area: 47/6400 (0.73%)
Spacing Modifier Letters: 10/80 (12.50%)
Superscripts and Subscripts: 17/48 (35.42%)
Quite a promising and ambitious start!
Looking forward to the font family being expanded to cover more writing systems
I was wondering if Devanagari would be included at some point. I’ll be interested to see what it looks like.
Hehe, don’t tell anyone but my colleague Amelie has started to doodle the Devanagari, just some rough pencil sketches when getting a bit bored with Latin. I am sure that in the coming months we can share some design concepts that could then be taken up by the community and expanded.
One of the challanges that need to be addressed are glyph coverage for the complex non-Latins. A Deva font project we did a couple of years ago contained 600 glyphs, most of which conjuncts. Maybe it’s overkill, maybe more are needed – we definitely would like to hear from people with specific typographic needs for the non-Latin scripts.
There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also.
This a very good writeup by the author hope to visit more very soon.
Best you should edit the page subject title Charactersets Canonical Design to something more generic for your content you make. I enjoyed the post all the same.