Category | Sans-serif |
---|---|
Classification | Humanist sans-serif |
Commissioned by | Canonical |
Foundry | Dalton Maag |
License | Ubuntu Font License |
Variations | Ubuntu Monospace & Ubuntu Condensed |
Website | https://design.ubuntu.com/font |
Ubuntu is an OpenType-based font family, designed to be a modern, humanist-style typeface [1] by London-based type foundry Dalton Maag, with funding by Canonical Ltd. The font was under development for nearly nine months, with only a limited initial release through a beta program, until September 2010. It was then that it became the new default font of the Ubuntu operating system in Ubuntu 10.10. [2] [3] Its designers include Vincent Connare, creator of the Comic Sans and Trebuchet MS fonts. [4]
The Ubuntu font family is licensed under the Ubuntu Font License. [5]
The font was first introduced in October 2010 with the release of Ubuntu 10.10 in four versions: Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic in English. With the release of Ubuntu 11.04 in April 2011, additional fonts and expanded language coverage were introduced. [6] [7] The final development is intended to include a total of thirteen fonts, consisting of:
The monospace version, used in terminals, was initially planned to ship with Ubuntu 11.04. However, it was delayed and instead shipped with Ubuntu 11.10 as the default system monospace font. [8]
The font is fully Unicode compliant and contains Latin A and B extended character sets, Greek polytonic, and Cyrillic extended. In addition, it has become the first native operating system font to include the Indian rupee sign. [9] The font has been designed primarily for use on screen displays, and its spacing and kerning is optimized for body copy sizes. [6] [10]
The Ubuntu Font Family is the default font for the current and development releases of the Ubuntu operating system and is used for the Ubuntu project branding. [5]
Ubuntu has been included in the Google Fonts directory, making it easily available for web typography, [11] and as of April 26, 2011, it is included for use in Google Docs. [12]
Ubuntu Monospace was prominently used in the 2014 video game Transistor. [13] [14]
Ubuntu bold-italic is also used in the bitcoin logotype, alongside the bitcoin symbol. [15] [16]
Ubuntu sans is the font used in the "GIF Maker" by the popular GIF sharing app Tenor, the font has become very popular in internet meme culture, being used commonly to caption GIFs and images. [17]
TV Tropes has used Ubuntu in its logo since 2016.
Publisher | Canonical Ltd. |
---|---|
Debian FSG compatible | No [18] |
FSF approved | No |
OSI approved | No |
The Ubuntu Font License is an "interim" [19] license designed for the Ubuntu Font Family, which has used the license since version 0.68. [5] The license is based on the SIL Open Font License. [20]
The Ubuntu Font License allows the fonts to be "used, studied, modified and redistributed freely" given that the license terms are met. The license is copyleft and all derivative works must be distributed under the same license. Documents that use the fonts are not required to be licensed under the Ubuntu Font License. [21]
Fedora and Debian have reviewed this license and converged on interpreting it as non-free due to incomplete or ambiguous use and modification permissions. [18] [22]
Arial is a sans-serif typeface in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 3.1, as well as in other Microsoft programs, Apple's macOS, and many PostScript 3 printers. In Office 2007, Arial was replaced by Calibri as the default typeface in PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook.
Courier is a monospaced slab serif typeface commissioned by IBM and designed by Howard "Bud" Kettler (1919–1999) in the mid-1950s. The Courier name and typeface concept are in the public domain. Courier has been adapted for use as a computer font, and versions of it are installed on most desktop computers.
Lucida is an extended family of related typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes and released from 1984 onwards. The family is intended to be extremely legible when printed at small size or displayed on a low-resolution display – hence the name, from 'lucid'.
Lucida Grande is a humanist sans-serif typeface. It is a member of the Lucida family of typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. It is best known for its implementation throughout the macOS user interface from 1999 to 2014, as well as in other Apple software like Safari for Windows. As of OS X Yosemite, the system font was changed from Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue. In OS X El Capitan the system font changed again, this time to San Francisco.
Roboto is a neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface family developed by Google as the system font for its mobile operating system Android, and released in 2011 for Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich".
The DejaVu fonts are a superfamily of fonts designed for broad coverage of the Unicode Universal Character Set. The fonts are derived from Bitstream Vera (sans-serif) and Bitstream Charter (serif), two fonts released by Bitstream under a free license that allowed derivative works based upon them; the Vera and Charter families were limited mainly to the characters in the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement portions of Unicode, roughly equivalent to ISO/IEC 8859-15, and Bitstream's licensing terms allowed the fonts to be expanded upon without explicit authorization. The DejaVu fonts project was started with the aim to "provide a wider range of characters ... while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development". The development of the fonts is done by many contributors and is organized through a wiki and a mailing list.
Thesis is a large typeface family designed by Luc(as) de Groot. The typefaces were designed between 1994 and 1999 to provide a modern humanist family. Each typeface is available in a variety of weights as well as in italic. Originally released by FontFont in 1994, it has been sold by de Groot through his imprint LucasFonts since 2000.
Everson Mono is a monospaced humanist sans serif Unicode font whose development by Michael Everson began in 1995. At first, Everson Mono was a collection of 8-bit fonts containing glyphs for tables in ISO/IEC 10646; at that time, it was not easy to edit cmaps to have true Unicode indices, and there were very few applications which could do anything with a font so encoded in any case. The original "Everson Mono" had a MacRoman character set, and other character sets were provided as separate files named with suffixes: "Everson Mono Latin B", "Everson Mono Currency", "Everson Mono Armenian" and so on. A range of fonts with the character set of the ISO/IEC 8859 series were also made. A single Unicode font file incorporating most or all of the characters from all of the previous separate Everson Mono files was named "Everson Mono Unicode" in 2003, but since 2008 the single large font has been named simply "Everson Mono". At present, there are regular, italic, bold, and bold-italic styles.
GNU FreeFont is a family of free OpenType, TrueType and WOFF vector fonts, implementing as much of the Universal Character Set (UCS) as possible, aside from the very large CJK Asian character set. The project was initiated in 2002 by Primož Peterlin and is now maintained by Steve White.
Linux Libertine is a typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to proprietary typefaces such as Times New Roman. It was developed with the free font editor FontForge and is licensed under the GNU General Public License and the SIL Open Font License.
Liberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, Liberation Serif, and Liberation Mono. These fonts are metrically compatible with the most popular fonts on the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office software package, for which Liberation is intended as a free substitute. The fonts are default in LibreOffice.
Droid is a font family first released in 2007 and created by Ascender Corporation for use by the Open Handset Alliance platform Android and licensed under the Apache License. The fonts are intended for use on the small screens of mobile handsets and were designed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation.
Nimbus Sans is a sans-serif typeface created by URW++, based on Helvetica.
Nimbus Mono is a monospaced typeface created by URW Studio in 1984, and eventually released under the GPL and AFPL in 1996 and LPPL in 2009. In 2017, the font, alongside other Core 35 fonts, has been additionally licensed under the terms of OFL. It features Normal, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic weights, and is one of several freely licensed fonts offered by URW++. Although not exactly the same, Nimbus Mono has metrics and glyphs that are very similar to Courier and Courier New.
The Public Type or PT Fonts are a family of free and open-source fonts released from 2009 onwards, comprising PT Sans, PT Serif and PT Mono. They were commissioned from the design agency ParaType by Rospechat, a department of the Russian Ministry of Communications, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Peter the Great's orthography reform and to create a font family that supported all the different variations of Cyrillic script used by the minority languages of Russia, as well as the Latin alphabet.
Libertinus is a typeface forked in 2012 from the Linux Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to proprietary typefaces such as Times New Roman. It is licensed under the SIL Open Font License.
Fira Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Erik Spiekermann, Ralph du Carrois, Anja Meiners, Botio Nikoltchev of Carrois Type Design and Patryk Adamczyk of Mozilla Corporation. Originally commissioned by Telefónica and Mozilla Corporation as part of the joint effort during the development of Firefox OS. It is a slightly wider and calmer adaptation of Spiekermann's typeface Meta, which was used at Mozilla's brand typeface at the time but optimized for legibility on (small) screens. With the name Fira, Mozilla wanted to communicate the concepts of fire, light and joy but in a language agnostic way to signal the project's global nature. Fira was released in 2013 initially under the Apache License and later reissued under the SIL Open Font License.
Overpass is a geometric sans-serif digital typeface, derived from Highway Gothic, but instead with a focus on usage as a webfont on digital screens for user interfaces and websites. It was designed by Delve Withrington with Dave Bailey, Thomas Jockin, Alan Dague-Greene, and Aaron Bell between 2011–2021. Overpass comprises 18 variants: 9 font weights and corrected obliques for each weight.
IBM Plex is an open source typeface superfamily conceptually designed and developed by Mike Abbink at IBM in collaboration with Bold Monday to reflect the design principles of IBM and to be used for all brand material across the company internationally. Plex replaces Helvetica as the IBM corporate typeface after more than fifty years, freeing the company from extensive license payments in the process.
Yea, there's 3 fonts used in the game. The terminals use Raleway and Ubuntu Mono, and the big OVC at the top uses Julius Sans One.
the OVC text is written in Ubuntu Mono: … Use of Ubuntu Mono is a really cool detail, considering that in real life Open Voting Consortium terminals are running on Linux.
The font is Ubuntu Bold Italic for the text.
The logo Bitcoin uses the Ubuntu Bold Italic font.
So we came to the compromise of an interim license, which you can find at code.launchpad.net/+branch/ubuntu-font-licence bzr. While licence proliferation sucks, I'm optimistic we'll converge in due course.