Cantarell font

Extended information

The Cantarell typeface family is a contemporary Humanist sans serif, and is used by the GNOME project for its user interface and the Fedora project.

Cantarell was originally designed by Dave Crossland as part of his coursework for the MA Typeface Design programme at the Department of Typography in the University of Reading, England.

Dave was motivated to undertake a study of typeface design because he believes it is essential that when we use digital tools, our freedom to use, understand, modify and share these tools is respected. Otherwise, when the tool does not work in the way that we need, we will be unable to fix it.

These fonts are developed using only such "libre" software, mainly FontForge.

Cantarell was originally aimed at on-screen reading in a specific use-case and environment: reading web pages on an HTC Dream mobile phone.

That device was the first to ship with Google Android, and came installed with a web browser that supported the exciting web fonts feature known as @font-face. As Dave's very first typeface design, the typeface has many faults, yet he asserts it achieves his goal of improving readability on this device.

The regular member of the family has had recieved the most focus, and a bold family has been developed quickly to provide better somewhat better results that an operating system's automatic bolding. In the case of oblique, we decided to rely on the system generated variant for now. An actual italics variant is planned.

The Regular font fully supports the following writing systems: Basic Latin, Western European, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Dutch and Afrikaans. To date, Pan African Latin has only 33% glyph coverage.

Since the design is aimed at display on-screen at small sizes, the printed output (especially of the bold and oblique) may not work well. Fonts tuned to the needs of printing will be developed in the future.

The fonts were initially published on the 6th of July 2009 on Dave Crossland's foundry website under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3. In May 2010 the fonts were republished through Google Web Fonts under the terms of the SIL Open Font License version 1.1. In November 2010 the project became part of the GNOME project and is now under active development by the GNOME design community.

Dave Crossland, 21st March 2011

Read more

FONTLOG for Cantarell GNOME 0.0.5
=================================

This file provides detailed information on the Cantarell font
software. This information should be distributed along with the
Cantarell fonts and any derivative works.

Font Information
-------------------------

The Cantarell typeface family is a contemporary Humanist
sans serif, and is used by the GNOME project for its user
interface and the Fedora project.

Cantarell was originally designed by Dave Crossland as part
of his coursework for the MA Typeface Design programme at
the Department of Typography in the University of Reading,
England. [1]

Dave was motivated to undertake a study of typeface design because
he believes it is essential that when we use digital tools, our
freedom to use, understand, modify and share these tools is
respected. Otherwise, when the tool does not work in the way
that we need, we will be unable to fix it.

These fonts are developed using only such "libre" software,
mainly FontForge [2].

Cantarell was originally aimed at on-screen reading in a specific
use-case and environment: reading web pages on an HTC Dream
mobile phone [3].

That device was the first to ship with Google Android [4], and
came installed with a web browser that supported the exciting web
fonts feature known as @font-face [5]. As Dave's very first typeface
design, the typeface has many faults, yet he asserts it achieves
his goal of improving readability on this device.

The regular member of the family has had recieved the most focus, and a bold
family has been developed quickly to provide better somewhat better results
that an operating system's automatic bolding. In the case of oblique, we
decided to rely on the system generated variant for now. An actual italics
variant is planned.

The Regular font fully supports the following writing systems:
Basic Latin, Western European, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central
European, Dutch and Afrikaans. To date, Pan African Latin has
only 33% glyph coverage.

Since the design is aimed at display on-screen at small sizes, the
printed output (especially of the bold and oblique) may not work
well. Fonts tuned to the needs of printing will be developed in
the future.

The fonts were initially published on the 6th of July 2009 on
Dave Crossland's foundry website [6] under the terms of the GNU
General Public License version 3. [7] In May 2010 the fonts were
republished through Google Web Fonts [8] under the terms of the
SIL Open Font License version 1.1. [9] In November 2010 the
project became part of the GNOME project and is now under active
development by the GNOME design community. [10]

Dave Crossland, 21st March 2011

[1]: http://www.typedesign.reading.ac.uk
[2]: http://fontforge.sf.net
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29
[5]: http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Web_font_linking_with_%40font-face
[6]: http://abattis.org/cantarell
[7]: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
[8]: http://www.google.com/webfonts
[9]: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL
[10]: http://live.gnome.org/CantarellFonts

* * *

Developer information
---------------------

The original src/Cantarell-Regular.sfd file has the master sources
as Cubic (PostScript) Bezier splines. There are temporary layers
and a 'Spiro' layer in this file, containing forms used to create
the master Cubic Bezier glyphs; the Spiro layer contains forms in
Spiro splines, and much of the original typeface design by Dave
Crossland was done by drawing in Spiro splines. However today the
master drawing spline format is Cubic Bezier, and Spiro splines
are used to inform their creation.

The Cantarell-Regular.sfd file is the _master_ source, and was
used to generate the Cantarell-Bold.sfd which is now a hard fork.

All development occurs by making changes to these drawing files.
When OTF or TTF binaries are compiled, they are copied to the
Cantarell-*-OTF.sfd and Cantarell-*-TTF.sfd files and then a
build process applied.

This means that there should be a 1:1 match between these files,
the OTF and TTF files in the otf/ and ttf/ directories, and the
output of generating new OTF and TTF files from FontForge.

The build process is simple; the Spiro and temp layers are removed,
in the case of TTF files all layers are converted to Quadratic from
Cubic, and then all glyphs have the Simplify, Add Extrema, Round
to Int, and Correct Direction operations applied.

In the future a build script will be developed to do this in an
automated way, which will be important for adding OpenType
Layout features through a feature.fea file.

ChangeLog
-------------------------

Please refer to the GNOME Git repository changelog at this URL:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/cantarell-fonts/log/

Acknowledgements
-------------------------

Here is a list of major contributors; all contributors are listed
in the GNOME Git repository changelogs.

If you make major modifications be sure to add your name (N), email (E),
web-address (W) and description (D). This list is sorted by last name
in alphabetical order.

N: Dave Crossland
E: [email protected]
W: http://abattis.org/cantarell/
D: Designer - original Latin glyphs

N: Valek Filippov
E: [email protected]
W: https://plus.google.com/108983215764171548842/about
D: Designer - cyrillic

N: Erik Hartenian
E: [email protected]
W: http://infinality.net
D: Connoisseur of fine font renderding

N: Pooja Saxena
E: [email protected]
W: http://www.poojasaxena.in
D: Designer - New glyphs and many improvements to weight and metric balance.

N: Jakub Steiner
E: [email protected]
W: http://jimmac.musichall.cz
D: Designer - many improvements and GNOME standards engineering

Copyright (c) 2009-2011, Understanding Limited ([email protected]),
Copyright (c) 2010-2011, Jakub Steiner ([email protected]).

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.
This license is copied below, and is also available with a FAQ at:
http://scripts.sil.org/OFL


-----------------------------------------------------------
SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE Version 1.1 - 26 February 2007
-----------------------------------------------------------

PREAMBLE
The goals of the Open Font License (OFL) are to stimulate worldwide
development of collaborative font projects, to support the font creation
efforts of academic and linguistic communities, and to provide a free and
open framework in which fonts may be shared and improved in partnership
with others.

The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and
redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The
fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded,
redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved
names are not used by derivative works. The fonts and derivatives,
however, cannot be released under any other type of license. The
requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply
to any document created using the fonts or their derivatives.

DEFINITIONS
"Font Software" refers to the set of files released by the Copyright
Holder(s) under this license and clearly marked as such. This may
include source files, build scripts and documentation.

"Reserved Font Name" refers to any names specified as such after the
copyright statement(s).

"Original Version" refers to the collection of Font Software components as
distributed by the Copyright Holder(s).

"Modified Version" refers to any derivative made by adding to, deleting,
or substituting -- in part or in whole -- any of the components of the
Original Version, by changing formats or by porting the Font Software to a
new environment.

"Author" refers to any designer, engineer, programmer, technical
writer or other person who contributed to the Font Software.

PERMISSION & CONDITIONS
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of the Font Software, to use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify,
redistribute, and sell modified and unmodified copies of the Font
Software, subject to the following conditions:

1) Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components,
in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself.

2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled,
redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy
contains the above copyright notice and this license. These can be
included either as stand-alone text files, human-readable headers or
in the appropriate machine-readable metadata fields within text or
binary files as long as those fields can be easily viewed by the user.

3) No Modified Version of the Font Software may use the Reserved Font
Name(s) unless explicit written permission is granted by the corresponding
Copyright Holder. This restriction only applies to the primary font name as
presented to the users.

4) The name(s) of the Copyright Holder(s) or the Author(s) of the Font
Software shall not be used to promote, endorse or advertise any
Modified Version, except to acknowledge the contribution(s) of the
Copyright Holder(s) and the Author(s) or with their explicit written
permission.

5) The Font Software, modified or unmodified, in part or in whole,
must be distributed entirely under this license, and must not be
distributed under any other license. The requirement for fonts to
remain under this license does not apply to any document created
using the Font Software.

TERMINATION
This license becomes null and void if any of the above conditions are
not met.

DISCLAIMER
THE FONT SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT
OF COPYRIGHT, PATENT, TRADEMARK, OR OTHER RIGHT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
COPYRIGHT HOLDER BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
DAMAGES, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE FONT SOFTWARE OR FROM
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE FONT SOFTWARE.