Let There Be Open Source Fonts
A few weeks ago I posed the question of whether free fonts had any place within a designer's toolkit. Having just stumbled across a nifty example of the genre, I of course have to share it with you. I'm not sure how I managed to overlook Gentium, since it's been available for several years and is a worthy effort on the part of its creator, Victor Gaultney, to help bridge the "digital divide"—the difference in access to information technology separating nations and peoples.
It seems Gaultney needed to create a font as part of his master's degree, while at the same time wanting it "to have some larger purpose—to address a practical need." Thus was born Gentium, a font that now includes 1,500 glyphs and is designed for use in extended Latin, Greek and Cyrillic text. At first this didn't really make me sit up and take notice. After all, we have OpenType fonts that support the mind-boggling character encoding possibilities of Unicode and there are font designers all over the world. I had assumed the typographic needs of just about everybody were met. But apparently that's far from true, with a combination of missing characters for many of the world's 6,000 languages and a lack of broad application support for both Unicode and OpenType combining to make things difficult. As is so often the case, it's hard for us to be aware of the breakdowns of those outside our narrow circle of vision.
The design goal for Gentium (Latin for "belonging to the nations") was to make it not only useful in many languages but legible, attractive... and free. It has won several awards since its release, notably in the Text category of the 2003 Type Design Competition, run by the Type Directors Club. By making it free, Gaultney has ensured its widespread use, and he went even further recently by releasing it under the SIL Open Font License, which permits modification and redistribution. Not that he won't be developing the font further—apparently a new version including more extended Latin glyphs, archaic Greek symbols, and full Cyrillic script support is a few months away, with italic and bold versions to follow.
I say, hats off to a valuable typographic initiative. Hopefully this will mark the beginning of more freely available fonts for cultures not being served by the commercial type foundries. More information and download links for the Windows, PC and Linux versions is available on the SIL International site.
Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com
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