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: Jakub Steiner E: jimmac@gmail.com W: http://jimmac.musichall.cz D: Designer - many improvements and GNOME standards engineering N: Dave Crossland E: dave@understandinglimited.com W: http://abattis.org/cantarell/ D: Designer - original Latin glyphs N: Erik Hartenian E: infinality@infinality.net W: http://infinality.net D: Connoisseur of fine font renderding