DejaVu fonts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Typeface | {{{name}}} |
|---|---|
| Category | Serif, Sans (sans-serif), Sans Mono (monospace) variants: Bold, Oblique, Bold Oblique |
| Designer(s) | derived from Bitstream Vera fonts |
| Foundry | None |
| Variations | Serif Condensed (*), Sans Condensed (*), (*): experimental style |
| Sample | |
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The DejaVu fonts are modifications of the Bitstream Vera fonts designed to extend this original for greater coverage of Unicode. The Bitstream Vera family was limited mainly to the characters in the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement portions of Unicode (roughly equivalent to ISO-8859-15) but was released with a license that permitted changes. The DejaVu fonts project was started with the aim to "provide a wider range of characters... while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development". The development of the fonts is done by many contributors, and is organized through a wiki and a mailing list.
The DejaVu fonts project was started by Štěpán Roh. Over time, it has absorbed several other projects that also existed to extend the Bitstream Vera typefaces; these projects include the Olwen Font Family, Bepa, Arev Fonts (only partially), and the SuSE standard fonts. The fonts are free as in freedom, and may thus freely be embedded. DejaVu fonts can be obtained for free (gratis) from DejaVuWiki project on SourceForge.
Recently there has been some controversy, or at least extended discussion, about the role of scripts typographically incompatible with the typographically similar scripts Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic (LGC) in the fonts. Most notably, Arabic has been added, but it has caused some software compatibility issues. Further, Latin and Arabic scripts have fundamentally different approaches to typefaces: while Latin fonts have serif and sans-serif versions, Arabic fonts have different distinctions (see the Islamic calligraphy article). It is still uncertain how the project should handle the mixture between different Latin faces and the different Arabic faces.
The uncertain status of Arabic and other alphabets has led to the creation of DejaVu LGC, a subset of the DejaVu fonts which contains only Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic characters. This version also tends not to experience as many software issues.
[edit] Coverage
DejaVu is a living project, which hopes covering completely the alphabetic scripts, abjads, and symbols with at all characters that are part of the MES-1, MES-2, and hopefully MES-3 subsets of Unicode, for each one of its supported style and variants. The coverage is already excellent, even though some more work is needed to include more hinting rules for clear results at small sizes. Some kerning rules are still being developed for the Sans and Serif styles, for fine typography. Some work is still also needed to create ligatures in these styles. It is still not known for now if the project will include support for the complex Indian abugida scripts which require a lot of ligatures and substitution features.
For now, in v2.8, the DejaVu Sans font includes 3,611 glyphs, 3,525 characters and 2,558 kerning pairs. It includes characters from the following unicode blocks:
- Basic Latin (96)
- Latin-1 Supplement (96)
- Latin Extended-A (128), Latin Extended-B (194)
- IPA Extensions (96)
- Spacing Modifier Letters (63)
- Combining Diacritical Marks (89)
- Greek (and Coptic) (124)
- Cyrillic (248)
- Cyrillic Supplement (16)
- Armenian (86)
- Arabic (110)
- Phonetic Extensions (68)
- Phonetic Extensions Supplement (37)
- Latin Extended Additional (246)
- Greek Extended (233)
- General Punctuation (87)
- Superscripts and Subscripts (29)
- Currency Symbols (19)
- Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols (2)
- Letterlike Symbols (29)
- Number Forms (49)
- Arrows (112)
- Mathematical Operators (216)
- Miscellaneous Technical (19)
- Control Pictures (2)
- Enclosed Alphanumerics (10)
- Block Elements (32)
- Geometric Shapes (96)
- Miscellaneous Symbols (161)
- Dingbats (174)
- Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A (5)
- Braille Patterns (256)
- Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B (9)
- Supplemental Mathematical Operators (54)
- Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (2)
- Private Use Area (8)
- Alphabetic Presentation Forms (12)
- Arabic Presentation Forms-A (70)
- Arabic Presentation Forms-B (141)
- Specials (1)
DejaVu Serif includes 1,820 glyphs, 1,806 characters and 1,300 kerning pairs in v2.8.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- DejaVuWiki (official website)
- Other Bitstream Vera derivatives
- The official DejaVu IRC channel
- Article about DejaVu fonts at LinuxFR.org (French)
- CNet article on DejaVu fonts, July 11, 2006
- Roozbeh Pournader's "Changing the default font in Fedora Core 6", June 12, 2006
- Owen Taylor's argument that putting "Arabic into DejaVu Sans is a shockingly bad idea"
