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Source Sans Pro: Adobe’s first open source font family
- devindotcom 14y agoGood for them. I'm not really digging the tail on the lowercase L next to the simple bar I. Otherwise I might give it a shot for my own site instead of Quattrocento Sans or Open Sans.
- user49598 14y agoThe license for those interested: SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE Version 1.1 - 26 February 2007 The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded, redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved names are not used by derivative works. The fonts and derivatives, however, cannot be released under any other type of license. The requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply to any document created using the fonts or their derivatives. http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=OFL http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&...
- ajross 14y agoThis comes close to dancing around the Open Source Definition (http://opensource.org/osd.html/ http://opensource.org/osd.html/) I think. The restriction on "not sold by themselves" would seem to be a violation of the "No Restriction on Fields of Endeavor" requirement. But it's close. It seems like a silly restriction anyway. What advantage would someone gain over Adobe by selling freely available fonts "by themselves" with no added value?
- Aloha 14y agoI think its designed to keep someone from taking the work, and selling it as their own. If you look at fonts, there are hundreds of thousands of unique fonts being sold individually.
- ajross 14y agoWell, sure. But these fonts are already open source. So who would buy it when they can get it for free from Adobe? This is like the resellers of free software on ebay. Sure, you can sell to a few dummies. And it's a little annoying. But it's not something that's going to hurt Adobe or its image meaningfully. Why bother polluting your license with this restriction?
- jonah 14y agoIf it's only going to affect people selling free stuff to ignorant people, why complain about the restriction? Wouldn't reducing people essentially scamming be a worthy reason for having that clause?
- ajross 14y agoOne good reason to complain about the restriction would be that it's a potential violation of the open source definition and a GPL-incompatible "additional restriction" on redistribution. And because it's just dumb.
- khaled 14y agoFWIW, OFL is an FSF-approved license http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SILOFL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SILOFL. Also it was not written by Adobe, Adobe here just picked the most widely used free software font license.
- tincholio 14y agoSo that people who don't know better don't get screwed. That seems like a worthy goal to me.
- bierko 14y agoThat's a really nice monospace.
- tsahyt 14y agoThe monospace version looks brilliant. Looks like something that could one day become my coding font. It's quite hard to find a nice monospace font and I think the choice does in fact matter (for coding obviously)
- emehrkay 14y agoIm no font nerd, but this looks great
- mmariani 14y agoBeautiful fonts. Thanks for the tip! :) Here's the download link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcesans.adobe/files/SourceSansPro_FontsOnly.zip/download http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcesans.adobe/files/Sourc...
- WiseWeasel 14y agoFor those wondering, the monospace variant is sadly not included, as it is currently under development.
- mmariani 14y agoI think the monospace will worth the wait. But the current fonts already hit a sweet spot, UI development for mobile apps. They will look amazing on the retina screens of iOS devices.
- Natsu 14y agoThat seems particularly ironic to me, given that a font like this where all the letters are made to be maximally distinguishable would be most useful as a monospace font.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoI don't do enough design to care about fonts, but I'll always take a chance at a new monospace font. Especially this one. Looks gorgeous. (The regular face looks good too, don't get me wrong, I just don't have good uses for it). [[On an aside, I love this thread. A post about the license, geeking out about the font and even more specifically the monospaced fonts. No where else would I see this conversation. :)]] edit: sorry to burst bubbles, the release/source doesn't include the monospaced variant yet.
- jaems33 14y agoYou don't have to design to care about fonts. I'm not a painter nor artist but I read about new paintings and artists. I don't play Starcraft 2 much but I still watch a bunch of Youtube replays.
- chbrown 14y agoUh, sourceforge? When I hear "making these files available" I think github or a simple website. Not something with a download.com-style "Wait 5 seconds while we force this ad down your throat and try to find a mirror because Route 53 / load-balancing is a foreign concept to us programmers still hanging out in the '90s."
- thisisblurry 14y agoIt does seem odd, especially since they have a Github organization account: https://github.com/adobe https://github.com/adobe
- pbhjpbhj 14y agoIs it about audience? I imagine SF has more regular users and github more programmers.
- DavidAdams 14y agoYou just can't please some people. Yes, that gift horse's mouth is a little dirty. :-)
- JohnTHaller 14y agoSourceForge has more bandwidth (IIRC) and has mirrors all over the world. I download from SF daily.
- phillmv 14y agoGod bless sourceforge; they were there at the beginning in our time of need. At this point, however, GitHub is a far larger organization. They host an order of magnitude more projects.
- JohnTHaller 14y agoGitHub is more popular for code management of underpinnings (think jquerry, twitter backend stuff, etc) but SourceForge is far more popular for actual apps. Nearly all the most popular GitHub projects, if you click downloads, you're met with "There aren't any downloads yet. But don't worry! You can download the source code as a zip or tarball above." SourceForge, on the other hand, is all about apps, usually cross-platform, that users can download and use (VLC, Pidgin, GIMP-Windows+Mac, OpenOffice, Inkscape, KeePass, etc). So, I think GitHub is more popular with coders, but SourceForge is far more popular with users and app makers.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- neya 14y agoWow...its beautiful!
- state 14y agoThere's so much work to be done in advancing the state of readability on the web. Widely available, properly drawn fonts do a lot to help. With only a quick look this looks like a really helpful contribution. I wonder if the name is a play on Open Sans.
- gojomo 14y agoBecause it's unclear with all the preamble, this is a release of 6 weights of the 'SourceSansPro' font in upright and italic styles. A monospace variant is a 'work in progress' that's not yet in the download package.
- jneal 14y agoMonospace is beautiful! Sad to see it's not included
- activepeanut 14y agoIs there a font that supports both European and Asian languages available for free anywhere?
- DASD 14y agoCan this font be self-hosted rather than use Typekit or other externally hosted services?
- pauldhunt 14y agoYes, it can be.
- b0sk 14y agoThey should atleast release the monospace as beta.
- pauldhunt 14y agoIt most likely will be in the next month or so, if you know where to look (hint: pay attention to Brackets).
- computerbob 14y agoCan I ask why this is such a big deal. I mean besides the point that adobe is opening something up for "open source". Is there a lack of fonts?
- crazygringo 14y ago> Is there a lack of fonts? That really made me laugh. I love it! :) Is there a lack of cookie recipes?
- MartinCron 14y agoThere aren't, yet, any fonts named "Cookie recipe", which would be a great name for a semi-serious handwriting font that's readable at small sizes.
- apendleton 14y agoA lack of fonts? No. A lack of high-quality, relatively-complete, free fonts? Absolutely. Free fonts usually come in one width, two weights (regular and bold) and two styles (roman and italic), for a total of four variations, and usually cover the Latin alphabet plus a few relatively-common variants (accented characters for western European languages, and maybe a couple of additional characters like the the German eszett or the Icelandic eth). Professional fonts will often come with perhaps five weights (light through black), three widths (condensed, normal, wide), and two styles, for a total of thirty variants. Some will also come in different optical sizes, or have other variable properties. Additionally, they'll have much larger character coverage (perhaps including Cyrillic or Greek), and have multiple stylistic variations of individual characters (stylistic alternates, swashes, old-style figures, etc.), as well as ligatures of commonly-colliding pairs of characters like "fi." Professional fonts can thus have literally thousands of times more glyphs, are very labor-intensive to produce, and are fairly expensive. This font is certainly less rich than most of Adobe's "Pro" line of fonts, but still looks much better than a lot of what's out there in terms of open source type.
- computerbob 14y ago
- moondowner 14y agoFinally a new monospaced font!:)
- apendleton 14y agoLooks like they haven't released the monospace variant yet.
- pauldhunt 14y agoNo, not yet.
- stock_toaster 14y agoIs there a plan to put a dot in the center (or something like this[1]) of the zero to differentiate it from capital o? I ask because I didn't notice any zeros in the code example. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift
- pauldhunt 14y agoYes, the zero is dotted.
- stock_toaster 14y agoGreat! Can't wait for it. :)
- jryan49 14y agoArch Linux packages I just created/added to AUR: otf-source-sans-pro: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=61403 https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=61403 ttf-source-sans-pro: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=61404 https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=61404
- gamzer 14y agoThank you very much! I was already a bit sad when I didn't find a Source Sans Pro package yesterday.
- laconian 14y agoI await Gruber's lengthy analysis of this font. (and the monospaced version)
- julianz 14y agoIt'll run something like "It's not the default font on the iPhone, therefore it's unreadable".
- stephanerangaya 14y agoThis is really good, and great gift to the Open Source community.
- mortenjorck 14y agoA new type family, without a prominently-featured specimen? A strange omission. The TypeKit page is a decent substitute, anyway: https://typekit.com/fonts/source-sans-pro https://typekit.com/fonts/source-sans-pro Not a bad News Gothic descendent at all. It takes News Gothic's structural personality and adds a bit of Frutiger's humanism.
- pauldhunt 14y agoThe PDF specimen is on the Adobe site (793K): http://store1.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/1959.pdf http://store1.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/1959.pdf
- FixThisPOSSite 14y agoNice, but I'd rather see them open-source Illustrator, so we can fix the glaring defects in this abandonware. On Windows you can use the far-superior Corel Draw, but Mac users simply have no viable native vector-art program.
- nihonjon 14y agoLooks like brand marketing to me.
- specto 14y agoSo can anyone send me in a direction to use this with LaTeX?
- petilon 14y agoSource Sans Pro is a dead ringer for Microsoft's beautiful Segoe UI. This is a great move by Adobe. The Open Source world now has an equivalent for Segoe UI. Web designers rejoice!
- pauldhunt 14y agoNot a dead ringer, but in the same category of sans serifs, for sure.