DejaVu fonts

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Sample

Typeface	{{{name}}}
Category	Serif, Sans (sans-serif), Sans Mono (monospace) variants: Bold, Oblique, Bold Oblique
Designer(s)	derived from Bitstream Vera fonts
Foundry	None
Variations	Serif Condensed (), Sans Condensed (), (): experimental style*

The DejaVu fonts are modifications of the Bitstream Vera fonts designed to extend this original for greater coverage of Unicode. The Bitstream Vera family was limited mainly to the characters in the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement portions of Unicode (roughly equivalent to ISO-8859-15) but was released with a license that permitted changes. 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.

The DejaVu fonts project was started by Štěpán Roh. Over time, it has absorbed several other projects that also existed to extend the Bitstream Vera typefaces; these projects include the Olwen Font Family, Bepa, Arev Fonts (only partially), and the SuSE standard fonts. The fonts are free as in freedom, and may thus freely be embedded. DejaVu fonts can be obtained for free (gratis) from DejaVuWiki project on SourceForge.

Recently there has been some controversy, or at least extended discussion, about the role of scripts typographically incompatible with the typographically similar scripts Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic (LGC) in the fonts. Most notably, Arabic has been added, but it has caused some software compatibility issues. Further, Latin and Arabic scripts have fundamentally different approaches to typefaces: while Latin fonts have serif and sans-serif versions, Arabic fonts have different distinctions (see the Islamic calligraphy article). It is still uncertain how the project should handle the mixture between different Latin faces and the different Arabic faces.

The uncertain status of Arabic and other alphabets has led to the creation of DejaVu LGC, a subset of the DejaVu fonts which contains only Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic characters. This version also tends not to experience as many software issues.

[edit] Coverage

DejaVu is a living project, which hopes covering completely the alphabetic scripts, abjads, and symbols with at all characters that are part of the MES-1, MES-2, and hopefully MES-3 subsets of Unicode, for each one of its supported style and variants. The coverage is already excellent, even though some more work is needed to include more hinting rules for clear results at small sizes. Some kerning rules are still being developed for the Sans and Serif styles, for fine typography. Some work is still also needed to create ligatures in these styles. It is still not known for now if the project will include support for the complex Indian abugida scripts which require a lot of ligatures and substitution features.

For now, in v2.8, the DejaVu Sans font includes 3,611 glyphs, 3,525 characters and 2,558 kerning pairs. It includes characters from the following unicode blocks: