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 from the DejaVu project on SourceForge.
Role of typographically-incompatible scripts
Recently there has been some question within the DejaVu community about the role of scripts typographically incompatible with the typographically-similar scripts Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic (LGC). 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 Islamic calligraphy). 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.
Coverage
DejaVu is an active project, which aims for complete coverage of the alphabetic scripts, abjads, and symbols with all characters that are part of the MES-1, MES-2, and hopefully MES-3 subsets of Unicode. The coverage is already considerable, although 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.As of version 2.25, it included characters from the following Unicode blocks. (The fraction given is the number of characters in each block that are included in the DejaVu fonts.)
- Basic Latin (95/95)
- Latin-1 Supplement (96/96)
- Latin Extended-A (128/128)
- Latin Extended-B (208/208)
- IPA Extensions (96/96)
- Spacing Modifier Letters (63/80)
- Combining Diacritical Marks (92/112)
- Greek and Coptic (127/127)
- Cyrillic (255/255)
- Cyrillic Supplement (20/20)
- Armenian (86/86)
- Hebrew (54/87)
- Arabic (111/235)
- N'Ko (54/59)
- Thai (1/87)
- Lao (65/65)
- Georgian (83/83)
- Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (404/630)
- Ogham (29/29)
- Phonetic Extensions (105/128)
- Phonetic Extensions Supplement (38/64)
- Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement (6/13)
- Latin Extended Additional (246/246)
- Greek Extended (233/233)
- General Punctuation (104/106)
- Superscripts and Subscripts (34/34)
- Currency Symbols (22/22)
- Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols (7/32)
- Letterlike Symbols (75/79)
- Number Forms (50/50)
- Arrows (112/112)
- Mathematical Operators (247/256)
- Miscellaneous Technical (117/232)
- Control Pictures (2/39)
- Enclosed Alphanumerics (10/160)
- Box Drawing (128/128)
- Block Elements (32/32)
- Geometric Shapes (96/96)
- Miscellaneous Symbols (176/176)
- Dingbats (174/174)
- Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A (7/39)
- Supplemental Arrows-A (16/16)
- Braille Patterns (256/256)
- Supplemental Arrows-B (128/128)
- Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B (13/128)
- Supplemental Mathematical Operators (72/256)
- Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (31/31)
- Latin Extended-C (17/17)
- Tifinagh (55/55)
- Yijing Hexagram Symbols (64/64)
- Modifier Tone Letters (5/27)
- Alphabetic Presentation Forms (58/58)
- Arabic Presentation Forms-A (72/595)
- Variation Selectors (16/16)
- Combining Half Marks (4/4)
- Arabic Presentation Forms-B (141/141)
- Specials (5/5)
- Tai Xuan Jing Symbols (87/87)
- Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols (107/996)
See also
References
External links
- DejaVuWiki (official website)
- CNet article on DejaVu fonts, July 11, 2006
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Thursday July 10, 2008 at 06:16:40 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
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 from the DejaVu project on SourceForge.
Role of typographically-incompatible scripts
Recently there has been some question within the DejaVu community about the role of scripts typographically incompatible with the typographically-similar scripts Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic (LGC). 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 Islamic calligraphy). 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.
Coverage
DejaVu is an active project, which aims for complete coverage of the alphabetic scripts, abjads, and symbols with all characters that are part of the MES-1, MES-2, and hopefully MES-3 subsets of Unicode. The coverage is already considerable, although 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.As of version 2.25, it included characters from the following Unicode blocks. (The fraction given is the number of characters in each block that are included in the DejaVu fonts.)
- Basic Latin (95/95)
- Latin-1 Supplement (96/96)
- Latin Extended-A (128/128)
- Latin Extended-B (208/208)
- IPA Extensions (96/96)
- Spacing Modifier Letters (63/80)
- Combining Diacritical Marks (92/112)
- Greek and Coptic (127/127)
- Cyrillic (255/255)
- Cyrillic Supplement (20/20)
- Armenian (86/86)
- Hebrew (54/87)
- Arabic (111/235)
- N'Ko (54/59)
- Thai (1/87)
- Lao (65/65)
- Georgian (83/83)
- Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (404/630)
- Ogham (29/29)
- Phonetic Extensions (105/128)
- Phonetic Extensions Supplement (38/64)
- Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement (6/13)
- Latin Extended Additional (246/246)
- Greek Extended (233/233)
- General Punctuation (104/106)
- Superscripts and Subscripts (34/34)
- Currency Symbols (22/22)
- Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols (7/32)
- Letterlike Symbols (75/79)
- Number Forms (50/50)
- Arrows (112/112)
- Mathematical Operators (247/256)
- Miscellaneous Technical (117/232)
- Control Pictures (2/39)
- Enclosed Alphanumerics (10/160)
- Box Drawing (128/128)
- Block Elements (32/32)
- Geometric Shapes (96/96)
- Miscellaneous Symbols (176/176)
- Dingbats (174/174)
- Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A (7/39)
- Supplemental Arrows-A (16/16)
- Braille Patterns (256/256)
- Supplemental Arrows-B (128/128)
- Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B (13/128)
- Supplemental Mathematical Operators (72/256)
- Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (31/31)
- Latin Extended-C (17/17)
- Tifinagh (55/55)
- Yijing Hexagram Symbols (64/64)
- Modifier Tone Letters (5/27)
- Alphabetic Presentation Forms (58/58)
- Arabic Presentation Forms-A (72/595)
- Variation Selectors (16/16)
- Combining Half Marks (4/4)
- Arabic Presentation Forms-B (141/141)
- Specials (5/5)
- Tai Xuan Jing Symbols (87/87)
- Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols (107/996)
See also
References
External links
- DejaVuWiki (official website)
- CNet article on DejaVu fonts, July 11, 2006
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Thursday July 10, 2008 at 06:16:40 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
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