Lorna | 3 April 2008

Basic Font Information

Gentium (“belonging to the nations” in Latin) is a Unicode typeface family designed to enable the many diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin script to produce readable, high-quality publications. The design is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and visually attractive. Gentium has won a “Certificate of Excellence in Typeface Design” in two major international typeface design competitions: bukva:raz! (2001), TDC2003 (2003).

The Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic font famililes are based on the original design, but with additional weights. The “Book” family is slightly heavier. Both families come with a complete regular, bold, italic and bold italic set of fonts.

The supported character set, however, is much smaller than for the main Gentium fonts. These “Basic” fonts support only the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement Unicode ranges, plus a selection of the more commonly used extended Latin characters, with miscellaneous diacritical marks, symbols and punctuation. For a complete list of supported characters see the list at the end of this document.

In particular, these fonts do not support:

  • Full extended Latin IPA
  • Complete support for Central European languages
  • Greek
  • Cyrillic

A much more complete character set will be supported in a future version of the complete Gentium fonts. These “Basic” fonts are intended as a way to provide additional weights for basic font users without waiting until the complete Gentium character set is finished. So please don’t request additional glyphs or characters to be supported in the Basic fonts – such support will become available in the main Gentium family in the future.

There are also some other limitations of the Basic fonts:

  • They are not completely metric-compatible with the full Gentium family
    (some glyphs may have different widths, although changes have been minimal)
  • There is no kerning
  • There are no “Alt” versions, or ones with low-profile diacritics
  • The default stacking style for some diacritic combinations does not match Vietnamese-style conventions (although this is available through a OpenType/Graphite feature)
  • No support for TypeTuner

There are, however, some wonderful new features that are still missing from the main Gentium family:

  • Bold!
  • Bold Italic!
  • The slightly-heavier Book family!
  • OpenType and Graphite smart code for diacritic placement!
  • A few useful OpenType and Graphite features
  • Support for a few more recent additions to Unicode and the SIL PUA (http://scripts.sil.org/UnicodePUA)
  • Character assignments are updated to conform to Unicode 5.1

In particular, the Basic fonts support a subset of the smart font features that the Doulos SIL font supports. Those features are:

  • Capital Eng alternates
  • Literacy alternates
  • Capital Y-hook alternate
  • Capital N-left-hook alternate
  • Modifier apostrophe alternate
  • Modifier colon alternate
  • Open o alternate
  • Vietnamese-style diacritics

Known Problems

We know of the following problems. Please report any other problems you encounter.

  • logicalnot (U+00AC) appears distorted in Bold Italic and Book Italic.
  • Opening the fonts with FontLab 5.0.x, then closing them, crashes FontLab. We are working to get this bug fixed in the next version of FontLab. A workaround is to open the font, save as a .vfb file, close (which still causes a crash). Then restart FontLab and open the .vfb file.

Limitations

There are also some other limitations of the Basic fonts:

  • They are not completely metric-compatible with the full Gentium family (some glyphs may have different widths, although changes have been minimal)
  • There is no kerning
  • There are no “Alt” versions, or ones with low-profile diacritics
  • The default stacking style for some diacritic combinations does not match Vietnamese-style conventions (although this is available through a OpenType/Graphite feature)
  • No support for TypeTuner.

Download the newest release packages from the Download Page.

Download v1.100 of the release packages from the Previous Versions Page.