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Final report about the project of adding Greek language support to the open source fonts of Cantarell

Google Summer of Code 2018

Final report about the project of adding Greek language support to the open source fonts of Cantarell

Links for the final GSoC evaluation

Process

Tools developed

Source


Synopsis

Cantarell is a humanist sans serif typeface intended for on-screen reading. It was originally developed by Dave Crossland in the MA Typeface Design class of 2009 at the University of Reading using free software. Subsequently, it was licensed under an SIL Open Font License and has been the standard UI typeface for the open source desktop environment GNOME since version 3.0 in 2010.

Cantarell has been redesigned for the release of GNOME 3.28 in March 2018. Post-script outline quality improved significantly, spacing has been reworked and new weights have been added.

The redesign is still under development. The family is currently growing to support additional writing systems. It doesn’t contain an Italic yet and has no kerning. At the time of this Gist’s publication in mid August 2018, Google Fonts hasn’t made it available to the broader public, providing the original fonts instead.

Process

After initially applying with extending another typeface, I was invited to change my project and add Monotonic and Polytonic Greek to the three Roman masters of Cantarell during Google Summer of Code 2018. I worked on it on a daily basis. The routine mainly followed the timeline originally proposed; I also kept a journal along the way.

Apart from the type design application Glyphs 2.5, I used freely available resources and open source tools like Drawbot for creating test PDFs and Kernkraft and Kernschmelze for kerning.

Cantarell Greek

Design

One design approach for Greek (pursued in some other humanist sans serif typefaces, e. g. Source Sans) is to introduce a slight stroke modulation to reference the script’s history. I decided against it. For its specific use case, I consider a more linear construction more suitable. Cantarell is employed in the GNOME UI environment, so I wanted to translate the Latin and Cyrillic letters’ sober appearance into the Greek ones.

In the beginning, I sketched possible solutions digitally, then started to design the Regular master, taking into account continuous mentor feedback. After the first evaluation, I worked on the Extra Bold and Thin master, intended for display purposes. From the second evaluation onward, I completed the character sets by adding the Polytonic diacritics.

The path defined by Cantarell’s preexisting accents offered some creative freedom. The ductus of swelling and fading strokes proved to be particularly interesting in the extremely Thin weight – especially in the design I came up with for Psili and Dasia as well as in its combinations with Varia and Oxia.

Outlook

I decided to implement basic kerning even though Latin and Cyrillic don’t feature it as of now. I didn’t finish it until the final evaluation: values of the Regular master are currently interpolated and have not been reviewed, kerning of punctuation with letters, and Polytonic diacritics in all weights will be completed in the aftermath of Google Summer of Code. The metrics might need additional updates in the future to match the Latin and Cyrillic counterparts which are still in progress.

The latter were altered while I was working on the Greek. I will have to make my expansion ready for merging and prepare it for the planned conversion of the source files from GLYPHS to UFO.

I will continue this project in the near future and tweak design details in the Greek set as I carry on learning about and getting better acquainted with this script.


GSoC 2018

Mentors

Student

Florian Fecher | EsadType, Amiens | GitHub | Twitter

Organization

Open Technologies Alliance – GFOSS | GitHub | Twitter


License

The Cantarell fonts and related code are licensed under an SIL Open Font License.

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