Adobe debuts its first open source type family
Adobe has announced Source Sans Pro, a new and free open source type family, which is the first of its kind from the software provider.
The Source Sans Pro family currently includes six weights, from ExtraLight to Black, in upright and italic styles. Adobe is also offering language support for Latin script (including Western and Eastern European languages), Vietnamese, the pinyin Romanization of Chinese, and Navajo.
The Creative Suite maker also cites that this font family is the first from Adobe to support both the Indian rupee and Turkish lira currency symbols. Adobe also has plans to add Cyrillic and Greek support as well as producing a monowidth version of the Source Sans design.
Adobe asserts that this marks another milestone for the company in developing and producing high-quality type tools. After fielding frequent requests for a typeface tailored to an open source environment, this new typeface is touted to be tailored to Adobe users’ specific needs while making another important contribution to the open source community.
There have already been questions and calls in the past pressing for Adobe to further embrace the open source community, so this is definitely a step in that direction at least.
Adobe typeface designer and font developer Paul Hunt explained in a blog post that one of the goals with this release is to use this project as a stepping stone towards further collaboration within the design community.
The primary need for type in Adobe’s open source applications has thus far been for usage within user interfaces. A second environment of perennial interest to Adobe is the realm of text typography. Thus the immediate constraints on the design were to create a set of fonts that would be both legible in short UI labels, as well as being comfortable to read in longer passages of text on screen and in print.
The full package of source files are available to download now via SourceForge. Source Sans Pro is also available for use on the web via font hosting services including Typekit, WebInk, and Google Web Fonts. Furthermore, the Source Sans family will be available for use directly in Google Apps documents and presentations soon.
Image via Adobe Typblography