Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Font Goodness: Gentium (A Typeface for the Nations)

SIL releases Gentium — an amazing font with astounding aspirations — for FREE.

Gentium is a typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin script to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode.

The design is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and visually attractive. The additional ‘extended’ Latin letters are designed to naturally harmonize with the traditional 26 ones. Diacritics are treated with careful thought and attention to their use. Gentium also supports both ancient and modern Greek, including a number of alternate forms. These fonts were originally the product of two years of research and study by the designer at the University of Reading, England, as part of an MA program in Typeface Design.


* drools *

It's not only ground-breaking in terms of scope... it's also a lovely, lovely typeface.

I've got mine... do you have yours?

2 comments:

Kim Siever said...

I wholeheartedly agree, Silus. Very nice. Just downloaded it.

Silus Grok said...

I love that it's an open license... freely available for improvements.

It would be great for this to ported to an OpenType format with complete ligature and other OT goodness scripted in.