Gentium — a typeface for the nations:
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.
SIL International has now embraced the Gentium project, and plans to continue development. Expansion of the glyph set to include more extended Latin glyphs, archaic Greek symbols, and full Cyrillic script support is the next step. Work on this has already begun, but the results will not be available for a few months. Addition of bold and bold italic faces will follow.
Via wood s lot.
*does happy typographer dance*
That’s curious – I’m doing my PhD at Reading! Coincidences!
That’s fantastic… and packages available for Linux, too. : )
I discovered this font a few months ago, when I was searching for fonts useful for academic work that would involve the medieval period. I really am looking forward to that nebulous date in 2004 when a more full-featured version of the font will be available (with bold and bold-italic!). That’s the only thing preventing me from using it as, say, my default web font. At the moment I am still using Junicode, though it doesn’t work in Camino for some stupid reason. Just as a little typographical aside, is there ever going to be a Unicode-friendly, user-friendly implementation of LaTeX (I think I got it right) that is native on OS X? I really hate having to completely root through my system to install a new font (I still haven’t been able to).
Unfortunately, it’s ugly. Bits are too thick.