There are a few more families that were part of this set.

Were there? Arimo, Tinos, and Cousine are already on GF.

Caladea is now on Google Fonts, https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Caladea?query=caladea

Carlito coming soon.

What is the reason for Carlito's delay, especially given the importance of its metric-compatibility with the ubiquitous Calibri?

I don't intend to poke anybody; I'm just genuinely curious.

From what I can tell:

• 2013-12-05: Carlito basically came into existence via ChromeOS Issue 280557.

• 2017-08-20: @Ganton noted in issue The web page about the Carlito font does not work. #1142 that Carlito was no longer available from Google Fonts; it was decided that it had never been available officially, and so the issue was closed.

• 2018-02-01: @cssobral2013 opened this issue Add Carlito and Caladea #1441 to request the inclusion of Carlito into Google Fonts.

• 2020-03-06: @m4rc1e gave the feared “SOON” response, which usually means “NOT SOON” or possibly even “NEVER”.

@vv-monsalve Did we work on Carlito at any pooint? I can't remember.

@vv-monsalve Did we work on Carlito at any pooint? I can't remember.

No, we only worked on Caladea last year, I didn't know about Carlito.

The ChromiumOS source says:

• The Carlito font was designed by Łukasz Dziedzic (@typoland).

• The license is OFL 1.1

• The distribution files are gotten from here, and have not changed since 2013-09-20.

• Sources for the font files don't appear to be anywhere readily accessible, as far as I can tell; and, nobody seems to care.

Perhaps @typoland would be willing to help move this issue along.

The file CONTRIBUTING.md lists some high-level criteria for including a font family in the Google Fonts project; here are the high-level criteria that need to be investigated for the inclusion of Carlito:

All High-Level Criteria

Tried to contact them about Carlito, hope they will answer ... if it's not open source there will be resistance in including it in certain distributions

The Carlito fonts were derived from Lato in a semi-automated semi-manual fashion, with some work done in FontLab Studio 5, some work done on the binary level, using proprietary software that is not publicly available.

The goal was to match the metrics and kerning of an existing font, so there were some tests, iterations and hackery involved. The production process was “one-off“.

Basically, there never were any “sources” from which the fonts could be re-built. I wrote some ad-hoc scripts for the process but they were never organized and never intended for release. They would not have benefitted the public anyway because they used now-defunct proprietary libraries which are no longer maintained by the authors.

The current TTFs are the best-available sources. I mean, were I to do any work on those fonts, I’d use the TTFs, as they're the only ones that fulfil the goal of having the metrics compatibility that the fonts were created for.

BTW, the original author of Calibri, Luc(as) de Groot, has publicly raised objections over whether Carlito is “original”. Whether the spacing and kerning of a font is subject to copyright has been the subject of some debate, and I think the concern is valid.

The Carlito fonts are “original” in terms of copyright law, I think, but are certainly not something that one might call “original design”.

I don't think Carlito is worthy of inclusion in Google Fonts. It’s a font in which the letters of the original design (Lato) have been algorithmically adjusted to fit the widths of another design. There was no quality design involved in the process. So the result is just an ugly Frankenstein monster — it's neither Lato nor Calibri.

Carlito may have fit its purpose for which it was created, but users should not be encouraged to use it beyond that.

Ps. As you're aware, quite a few acquisitions happened in the font industry in the past years (Monotype, Bistream, FontShop, URW). These companies had some old proprietary tools that could work on the TTF level, for example Incubator Pro: https://vimeo.com/193433222

I have used some of such tools in the production process. Because these tools are a “black box”, any previous, intermediate steps in the build process of Carlito aren't really “sources”. I have also deleted many of those steps because I was not developing a “replayable” build process but a very specific set of deliverables.

I didn’t even document the build process for myself — because of the very specific brief. As a result, the TTFs are the best “sources”, because they best reflect the main point why Carlito was created — metric compatibility with another font.

If you want “higher-level” sources, https://github.com/latofonts/lato-source are such sources.

Thanks @ronaldtse I have finally merged this PR. @twardoch PTAL

Thank you very much @davelab6 ! Very glad to be able to use the font from its rightful location 😉