Comments Since the release of Source Sans Pro we have received an enormous amount of feedback which, in addition to congratulating us on the project, has made us aware of a number of issues that affected this font family. I’m pleased to say that we have revised the fonts and that the updated files have been posted on Open@Adobe at SourceForge. Here’s the list of changes:
- Improved sidebearings of some glyphs, improved kerning classes, improved some kern pairs.
- Fixed metrics issues with upright letter D and composites.
- Added glyphs and OpenType feature support for Jarai language.
- Added ‘ordfeminine’ glyph to ‘ss02′ feature.
- Changed glyph name ‘schwa.supss’ to ‘uni0259.sups’.
- Changed weightClass value of the ExtraLight fonts from 250 to 200.
- Changed OS/2.usWinAscent and OS/2.usWinDescent values to be the same across all fonts.
- Changed hhea.Ascender and hhea.Descender values as a result of the OS/2usWin changes.
- Changed OS/2 table version number from 4 to 3.
- Harmonized the copyright strings.
Also today, in response to the many requests we got, I’m happy to announce that Source Sans Pro is now hosted on GitHub as well. We expect this repository to become the place where we engage with the community and do the continuous development, whereas SourceForge will remain the location where we post each stable revision of the family.
We had heard about GitHub before, but we weren’t aware how popular it was. The team had little experience using it or working with the tools available for interacting with the repositories. Fortunately, we were able to enlist the help of Paul Picazo, a colleague from the EchoSign team, who gave us a two-hour crash course which got us most of the way up-to-speed with the tools and processes. Thanks a lot Paul!
Finally, for the many of you who expressed interest in the monowidth version of the Source Sans design, all I can say for now is that its development is moving along quite well and that we’ll have more news in the near future.
What’s the benefit of using OS/2 version 3 instead of 4, I’m wondering?
Some old software requires OS/2 version 3. Since the font does not require the new bits that were introduced with version 4, there’s no harm to switch to version 3.
Will there be an effort to submit new releases of this font to the Debian unstable package repositories? Maybe a “fonts-sourcesans” or “fonts-sourcesanspro” package? I ask because submitting to Debian not only puts it in the hands of Debian users, but also trickles down to Ubuntu and its derivatives.
Can they not just grab the fonts?
I was thinking of ways to make it easier for casual people and gain exposure for the font. It may be easier for some to just install the font in the Ubuntu Software Center or “apt-get install sourcesanspro” instead of searching out the zip file, extracting files to /usr/share/fonts/ as a superuser, then running sudo fc-cache -fv in the terminal.
I appreciate the suggestion, but I’m not familiar with Debian package repositories. What my question was trying to find out was, can’t someone from Debian just get the fonts and make them available to everyone that uses that OS?
Debian’s packaging policies are here
Are you answering my question? If you are I don’t see how that link is relevant.
The upload date on Font Squirrel suggests it may be the older version:
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/source-sans-pro
Thought I’d mention it if that is the case.
I don’t know which version Font Squirrel is serving.
I am very very pleased with this font. Indeed, the first thing I did after discovering this font is make it the headline font on my webpage.
One thing I’m really happy about which no one has mentioned before is that this font is a “multi master” font. Multi master fonts is a technology that Adobe created in the early 1990s when “morphing” was all the rage; it allows a font to smoothly change from one form to another. Alas, the technology never caught on, and multi master fonts are very rare. Until Source Sans Pro, there did not exist a single open-source general use multi master font.
Fontforge, as it turns out, has full support for multi master fonts. This allows anyone to easily make a variant of Source Sans Pro with any font weight they want using free tools.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the fonts. To clarify, the fonts themselves are not multiple master format, however the sources used to produce the fonts do make use of a multiple master design space.
Indeed. The nice thing about the Multi-Master format is that it is supported by open-source tools. I spent all morning in Fontforge making a “Source Sans” variant (with the name “Userspace”) with some 15 different font weights.
While hinting information is lost, I have a zip file with a bunch of true type fonts as a demonstration of what is possible with a Multi-Master font and open-source tools. For anyone who is interested: Click on my name to go to my webpage, then click on “blog” at the top, then click on the “Multi Master fonts” entry.
Again, thank you for the great font and I’m really pleased to see people still using cool technologies like Multi-Master.