Adobe’s legacy in type technology
Adobe has come a long way since its early days in which the specification for the PostScript Type 1 font format was a closely-guarded trade secret leading up to the “font wars.” Since this specification was begrudgingly published in 1990, Adobe has been more proactive in publicly releasing tools for developing and producing high-quality type. Subsequently, Adobe collaborated with Microsoft on the OpenType standard, which was later made an open standard for type technology as the Open Font Format: a free, publicly available standard (ISO/IEC 14496-22:2009). In connection with this, Adobe has shared its tool set for building OpenType fonts as the Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO). Although these tools are not open source, they can be used freely and have been downloaded by thousands of users. Additionally, tools such as FontLab Studio and FontMaster make use of AFDKO code for building fonts. I believe that the world of type design and typography has benefited greatly from Adobe’s contributions in the arena of type technology. In adding to this legacy, I am proud to announce that today marks another milestone as Adobe makes yet another type resource freely available by releasing the Source Sans Pro family as our first-ever open source type family.
Adobe’s open source contributions have not only been limited to the realm of type. In recent years, Adobe has been publishing more specifications and creating more open source tools. In fact, Adobe has partnered with SourceForge to maintain many of our projects on the Open@Adobe portion of that site. As more platforms and applications are being developed at Adobe as open source software, our type team has been fielding more frequent requests for type for these environments. Although there are many open source type families currently available, we felt that our applications would benefit from a typeface tailored to their specific needs and that this would be an opportunity for us to make a useful contribution that would benefit Adobe, the open source community, type developers, as well as anyone who uses type.
The brief & development
The primary need for type in Adobe’s open source applications has thus far been for usage within user interfaces. A second environment of perennial interest to Adobe is the realm of text typography. Thus the immediate constraints on the design were to create a set of fonts that would be both legible in short UI labels, as well as being comfortable to read in longer passages of text on screen and in print. In thinking of typeface models that accomplish these tasks well, I was drawn to the forms of the American Type Founders’ gothics designed by Morris Fuller Benton. In particular, I have always been impressed by the forms of his News Gothic and Franklin Gothic, which have been staples for typographers since their introduction in the early twentieth century. While keeping these models in mind, I never sought to copy specific features from these types. Instead, I sought to achieve a similar visual simplicity by paring each glyph to its most essential form.
News Gothic type specimen from the American Type Founders’ Specimen Book and Catalogue, 1923. Actual Size.
During the development process, I was fortunate to be able to work with application developers who deployed beta versions of what would become Source Sans in the environments for which they were intended. In fact, preliminary versions of the design have already shipped with a couple of Adobe open source projects. A very early version of the type family has been included in the Strobe Media Playback platform, using the name Playback Sans. More recently, the WebKit-based code editor, Brackets, has featured updated versions of the Source Sans fonts in its user interface, as well as on its home page. Having real world testers, I was able to receive recommendations on ways I could improve the design. One particular feature that came about due to user feedback is the treatment of the lowercase l. To fully differentiate it from the uppercase I, I gave the default glyph for this letter a tail, even though it is uncharacteristic for this particular type style. For usages where this level of distinction is not required, there is an alternate, simple lowercase l (without the tail) accessible via stylistic alternates or by applying a stylistic set.
Differences between commonly confusable characters: 1, I, and l.
About the fonts
We realize that the majority of users interested in this project will likely only want the fonts. For this purpose, there is a Source Sans font package that includes just these resources. The family currently includes six weights, from ExtraLight to Black, in upright and italic styles. The fonts offer wide language support for Latin script, including Western and Eastern European languages, Vietnamese, pinyin Romanization of Chinese, and Navajo (an often overlooked orthography that holds some personal significance for me). These fonts are the first available from Adobe to support both the Indian rupee and Turkish lira currency symbols. Besides being ready for download to install on personal computers, the Source Sans fonts are also available for use on the web via font hosting services including Typekit, WebInk, and Google Web Fonts. Finally, the Source Sans family will shortly be available for use directly in Google documents and Google presentations. Full glyph complement specimens (793K) are available in the Adobe type store along with informational pages for each style.
In making these fonts open source, it is important to us to make all the source files we used in their production available so that they can be referenced by others as a resource on how to build OpenType fonts with an AFDKO workflow. The full package of source files can be obtained from the Source Sans download page on SourceForge. As part of this ongoing project, we are publishing a roadmap of features that we plan to implement in the near future. At present, this includes items such as expanding the fonts to provide Cyrillic and Greek support, as well as producing a monowidth version of the Source Sans design.
Monowidth variant of Source Sans (work in progress)
In addition to making these files available as a learning resource, we are eager that this project will become an undertaking in which we can collaborate with others in the design community. We hope that if any of you want to build upon these assets that you will consider coordinating with us to help add features and increase language support for this family. In fact, this project has already been a concerted effort (as is so much of type design). I am grateful to Robert Slimbach for his guidance throughout this project — the design would not have been anywhere near as good without his input. I am indebted to Miguel Sousa who ensured that all of my files were fit for publication. I would also like to thank Ernie March for his work in testing and vetting the font files. We hope that you find these fonts useful in your work and we look forward to seeing the interesting ways in which you employ them in your designs.
Updated 2 August 2012, 5:35 PM to add information regarding PDF specimens.
Congrats Paul!
Hope this is only the first one of a lot more open source fonts to come!
Also, congrats for making not only the fonts, but the source code available as well.
Thanks, Pablo. :^D
This is a pretty significant ‘open font’ release. Will be an appreciated and valuable source for designers, learners and teachers, oh and end-users
Would love to hear more about the ‘why’ though, why release this particular design under an open license? and why now?
-vernon
I thought those questions were answered in the body of the post. In response to the timing, in open source they say, “release early and release often”; this was the earliest, stable version of the fonts we felt we could announce publicly.
Sadly AFDKO is not open, meaning that those who prefer not to use proprietary software cannot contribute and the fonts cannot be included in Linux distros that build from source
What would be needed to make the fonts buildable by Linux?
Fedora would be able to include this font — our guidelines only state that they *should* be built from source when possible. (Obviously not possible here.)
However, the popular way to build from source that I know of is with FontForge.
I’ll look into making FontForge sources available.
I want to say up front that I don’t really know how AFDKO works, and also I am assuming that you genuinely want to know the answer to this question. I apologize if I’m telling you things you already know, and I gotta also warn you that there is a long way from here to a font that is actually improvable by its user community.
First, AFDKO appears to generate OpenType font files from Type1 font files plus additional annotations. Are any of the files you have published generated from some even-more-fundamental source format? If so, you need to release those files.
Second, to “make the fonts buildable by Linux” (by which I assume you mean distributable as part of a Linux distribution that’s picky about these things), there would need to exist fully-featured open source tools that can do everything your existing build process (AFDKO or otherwise) does. By “do everything” I mean that if you use these tools you get font files that match the “official” files in all details that affect rendering.
Third, whatever the true source formats for these fonts actually are, if you want to enable the user community to modify the fonts, there need to be open-source editors for those source formats that can do everything that your in-house editors do.
Fourth, if you want to build a community of developers around these fonts rather than just a community of users, you have to do development in public. That means the master version control repository, bug tracker, and development mailing list for these fonts are all publicly accessible (it may be easiest to host them on Sourceforge for now). If you don’t do your development discussions on a mailing list, time to start.
The easy way to achieve at least some of this would be to open-source AFDKO itself. The harder, but arguably better-in-the-long-run, way would be to contribute to the development of FontForge until it is feature-equivalent to AFDKO (plus whatever your internal tools are).
Thanks for bringing up these points. As this is our first open source offering, these are all matters we will have to deal with going forward. This is just the beginning of this journey for us, so please be patient as we try to figure out things along the way. I will personally look into the issues you bring up here and be working on a plan on how to address these items where we can.
Embrace the real openness! Release the WIP monospaced fonts!
(Not making a comment on your openness, just pining for that gorgeeeeous monospace font you’re teasing us with).
Hehe, the fonts are forthcoming, still adding goodies to them.
do you have an estimate on when we could expect the monospaced fonts?
I really can’t say. I have to balance work on this project with several other projects I am working on concurrently. It may be sometime later this year.
It looks awesome and fits nicely in Brackets
Good job!
Thanks! Working with the Brackets team is awesome and has been a great boon to this project.
Just thought I’d comment just to thank you for supporting open source.
You’re very welcome.
Nothing more to add: Thank you!
You’re welcome!
Thank you, Paul. You have another fan here patiently waiting for the monospace font release. What a tease! It’s beautiful! I can’t wait to write code using it.
Hehe, maybe I shouldn’t have leaked it so early.
Very well done! Continue.
Yes sir!
A new mono-spaced font with Cyrillic support is more than welcomed! Great job Adobe!
I’ll need some time for that, but it’s in the works.
Appreciated
I too just want to say thanks. Six-weights is nice variety for the font. Nice Work
Thank you for your kind words.
Any interest in also hosting these on GitHub (especially the source)? I would be curious to see the potential community involvement. Either way, this is fantastic.
I will look into it.
Great work Paul, a really nice looking font you created here. Looking forward to using it with LibreOffice!
Thanks, Christian. I hope they work well for your needs.
Thank you Paul and Adobe. Beautiful en very useful face. Much appreciated!
You’re quite welcome.
Nice! Kudos for differentiating between the capital I and lower-case L, but a capital I without crossbars should simply never happen. You can tell the difference with this font if there happen to be lower-case L’s around for context, but otherwise it still looks like a lower-case L.
The crossbars on a capital I are not a serif, any more than the bottom bar is on the 1 (which this font has).
There is an alternate uppercase I with crossbars available via OpenType features if that is your preference.
Lovely font. Thank you.
In paragraph 3, “it’s” should be “its”.
Fixed. Thank you.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the BLOG on the development of this font – Source Sans Pro.
I’m always on the lookout for fonts that are free to embed in apps and websites.
Regards,
Jason
It’s interesting that you were drawn to the sans serif forms of Morris Fuller Benton, and not, for example, to Helvetica, Univers, Gill Sans, Tahoma, Verdana, etc. Morris Benton was passionate about legibility in his text designs. Perhaps that’s why Franklin Gothic and News Gothic, as you say, have been staples for typographers since they were introduced in the early twentieth century. Thanks!
Just out of curiosity, Paul, how much of the Unicode standard to you plan on implementing within this font?
As much as is useful and that we can get help implementing: I can’t do it all myself.
Paul, these look great, and I’m eager to experiment with them in some applications I maintain and distribute.
Would you mind sharing what tools did you use to build and design the font family?I’m very curious about the construction aspect (as well as the design).
I wanted to include a tech note that documents this, but ran out of time. I will email it to you once I get it written up and include it in future releases of the sources package.
First, thanks very much for making this available, and I look forward to using it (and the monospace one!). Just curious, are you planning to add any ligature glyphs? It is a personal preference, but the lack of “fi” ligature particularly jumps out at me, especially in Bold.
Looking again, I see them in the specimens, but it looks like TypeKit doesn’t make use of them and Google Web Fonts doesn’t show it in the glyph list – not sure why that is.
I designed the typeface to not need ligatures for ‘fi’ nor ‘fl’. There are ligatures for ‘ff’ and ‘ft’. I may add more but, not many.
This font looks really great. A professional look. Hoping some more in the future for the open font family.