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Short URL: http://scripts.sil.org/Gentium_status

Gentium — Project Status

Victor Gaultney, 2004-01-09; 26474 reads

Download main Gentium fonts | Download Gentium Basic fonts

‘Thank you very much for this excellent font. It is the most readable I have ever seen.’

‘Officina Gentium: The workshop of the world.’

The Gentium project is not complete, but does provide a lot of functionality even in its current form.

First of all, the current version of the main Gentium fonts only include a single weight in regular and italic styles. There are, however, two new font families - Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic - that provide a full set of four weights (regular, bold, italic, bold italic). These new families are available here.

Eventually the main Gentium fonts will have the new weights (including the complete Book family), Latin support extended to Unicode 5.1, more ancient Greek glyphs and full extended Cyrillic script support. There has been some work done on these, but they are yet completed.

There have also been requests for a complementary sans-serif face. We have a new sans-serif typeface in development - Andika. It is not particularly designed to match Gentium, but may work. In the mean time, Lucida Sans, tracked a little tighter, works well. Priorities for any future development will be strongly influenced by the feedback given by users. If you would like to add your priorities to those of others please fill out the form on the download page.

The following table lists each glyph set and subgroupings with their status in four areas: design, kerning, hinting and ‘smarts’. The last of these refers to the addition of advanced rendering tables for technologies such as in OpenType, Apple Advanced Typography or SIL's Graphite. This table also serves as a wish list! Status is marked as Complete / Partial / Begun / Not Started. If a certain glyph set or area of development is not going to be seriously considered, or if something is not applicable, then it is marked with — .

The table below only refers to the main Gentium family, not the new Basic fonts.

	Design	Kerning	Hinting	Smarts
Latin
Basic	Comp	Part*	Begun*	—
Extended	Comp	NS	NS	Comp**
Accented	Comp	Part	NS	Comp**
Diacritics	Comp	—	NS	Comp**
Alternate Diacritics	Comp	—	NS	NS
Vietnamese	Comp	Part	NS	Comp**
Unicode 5.1	Part	NS	NS	Comp**
Small Caps	Part	NS	NS	Part
Greek
Monotonic	Comp	Comp	NS	NS
Polytonic	Comp	Comp	NS	NS
Archaic	Part	—	NS	NS
Porsonic Circumflex	Comp	Comp	NS	NS
Small Caps	NS	NS	NS	NS
Coptic	—	—	—	—
Cyrillic
Basic Russian	Comp	NS	NS	NS
Extended	Part	NS	NS	NS
Small Caps	NS	NS	NS	NS
Historic	—	—	—	—
Numerals
Basic	Comp	—	NS	—
Superscript/Subscript	Comp	—	NS	NS
Extra Fractions	NS	—	NS	NS
Old Style	NS	NS	NS	NS
Punctuation & Others
Basic	Comp	Part	NS	—
Extended	Part	Part	NS	—
Math	Part	NS	NS	—
Misc. Symbols	Begun	NS	NS	—

* Notes: Kerning for Latin is currently limited to the most troublesome pairs for English, and would require language analysis software to be useful for all Latin-based languages. Hinting for Basic Latin is partially complete, but is not included in current release (sorry!).

** Smart code for Gentium will be based on the current code for our other extended Latin fonts.

Notes for contributors

The main point of version 1.02 is to enable modification via the OFL and to establish a means for people to contribute to the project. For information on what you're allowed to change or modify, consult the OFL and OFL-FAQ. The OFL-FAQ also gives a very general rationale regarding why you would want to contribute to the project.

Anyone can make their own modified version of Gentium (using a different name), but SIL International will continue to maintain and develop the canonical version of the Gentium fonts. As the package maintainer, we warmly welcome contributions. Here are some things to keep in mind:

Format: We are open to contributions in various formats, but if you want to maximise the chances of us including your work, please make it available to us (via email or a URL) as either a FontLab database (preferred) or a PostScript Type 1 (or OT-CFF) font.

Source files: For the first time, we're including FontLab databases used in developing the fonts. The current fonts, however, were not solely built from this FontLab database, so a simple "Generate Font" will not give you an identical result. These databases are provided not as canonical source but as an aid to anyone who might find it useful to have access to the PostScript-style curves before they were turned into TrueType ones. BTW - although only two databases are provided, they contain all the Alt glyphs. In the future we may be making our 'source' available in three formats:OpenType (TrueType), OT-CFF, and FontLab.

Copyright attribution: If you submit something for inclusion in the main Gentium fonts, we will ask you to affirm that it is your original work, and ask you to assign the copyright of your work to SIL International. This is to ensure that future releases can be made under improved versions of the OFL without needing to track you down for further permission. This follows the same principle used by the FSF. Keep in mind that we are a not-for-profit organization committed to free/libre and open source software, and that any contributions incorporated in the fonts will always
be available under the OFL or a similar license.

Quality: Because we want to be able to guarantee a high level of quality for the primary Gentium fonts, we will review submissions carefully. Please don't be discouraged if we do not include a submission for this reason, or ask you to make specific revisions.

What types of contributions are welcomed now (some more than others):

Old style figures
Specifications for smart Greek code (write us about this)
Coptic
Historic/Archaic Cyrillic
Glyphs used for ancient Greek text study (but not alphabetic ones, like the digamma)
Mathematical glyphs
OpenType code and glyphs for on-the-fly fraction creation
Additional scripts (Armenian, etc.?)
Other things that we may have once told you we didn't have time to do :-)

What is not needed at this point:

Revisions to the basic letters or their spacing
Cyrillic revisions or additions. These are already in process.
Other weights (Bold, Bold Italic). We already have some work done on this.
Small caps. Also in progress.
Alphabetic Ancient Greek glyphs (digamma, etc.). These are done and are waiting for the next release.
Unicode 5.1 additions for Latin. We have these already in the pipeline.
Other OpenType/Graphite/AAT code - we already have this (see our Doulos SIL project).
Kerning - there is some in place
Hinting - although if you could offer to do some hinting, let us know :-)

So why didn't we include some of this in this release? The only big change for 1.02 is the new licensing model. We thought that it was important to get a revised font out before we had completed the next big revision. We also didn't want to hold up release until we had everything neat and tidy :-)

When submissions will be included: We hope to have a revised version of the Regular and Italic fonts (including full Cyrillic) completed in 2008. Other weights will follow after that.

WARNINGS: The details of the source files and build procedures will be changing radically before the next release, so do not spend too much time working on systems that depend on the current FontLab database information. Also - the Cyrillic glyphs in the regular font are very early prototypes and will be changing completely. So don't bother to modify them!

Version History

Current versions

Gentium Basic Release 1.1 — 4 April 2008

New release. See information on the Gentium Basic page.

Gentium Release 1.02 — 28 November 2005

New release to change licensing to use the SIL Open Font License. Other changes:

Included FontLab source files
Fixed some duplicate PostScript glyph names
Fixed italic angle

Older versions

Gentium Release 1.01 — 19 September 2003

First release as a project of SIL International. Changes from 1.00:

Internal font information (copyright, license, etc.) changed to reflect transition to SIL
PS name of Greek lowercase mu changed from 'mu' to 'uni03BC' to try and work around rare display problem

Gentium Release 1.00 — 16 September 2002

First public release.

Gentium Release 0.54 — 8 August 2002

Version completed for University requirements. Fonts carry the 'RU' suffix.

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