July 11, 2006, 2:24 pm
Applying Open Source to the Realm of Font Design
By Lisa Agustin
Considered primarily an approach to programming, the “open source” method is now being applied to the unlikely area of font design, specifically for Linux.
Open source type design is not a completely new idea. In 2003, a font family called Vera was developed for open-source use. Under the license terms, anyone was permitted to make new fonts based on Vera, as long as the derivatives were given a different name. The latest effort in this movement is tied to DejaVu, a Vera derivative that has sparked the interest of different Linux players:
DejaVu has caught on widely enough for it to be the default font for Dapper Drake, the latest update to Ubuntu Linux. It may also become the default font for Red Hat’s Fedora version of Linux.
“DejaVu, from purely a user perspective, seems to be the one that has the momentum and benefits behind it,” said Rahul Sundaram, one of nine board members for the Fedora Project, which governs the Linux version.
Taking a collaborative approach to type design has been particularly helpful in addressing practical concerns for making fonts, such as the creation of special characters or glyphs for other languages:
In the software world, creating a new offshoot is called “forking.” The freedom to do so is one hallmark of an open-source project. Several designers launched their own Vera forks… The designers had initially created limited extensions to include Western languages such as Welsh or Catalan, then later took on larger and more ambitious extensions, such as Greek and Cyrillic.
The renewed interest in improving this aspect of Linux goes beyond improving typeface presentation for its own sake–it demonstrates that elements of the user interface are just as important as performance factors in offering Linux as an alternative to the Windows operating system.
