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Gentium Gentium Basic Fonts
‘Many thanks. I have an aesthetic dislike of “Times” fonts and a scholar‘s budget. Now I have Gentium and I‘m pleased as punch.’
Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic are font families based on the original Gentium 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. Google Web Fonts Gentium Basic is now available for use on web pages via the Google Web Fonts service! This makes it very easy for you to use on your website. For more information on this and other ways to use SIL fonts on web sites see Using SIL Fonts on Web Pages. Supported character rangesThe 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. In particular, these fonts do not support:
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.
Supported character ranges LimitationsThere are also some other limitations of the Basic fonts:
New FeaturesThere are, however, some wonderful new features that are still missing from the main Gentium family:
In particular, the Basic fonts support a subset of the smart font features that the Doulos SIL font supports. Those features are:
More detail on the features can be seen in the Doulos SIL Technical Documentation. Known ProblemsWe know of the following problems. Please report any other problems you encounter.
LicenseGentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic are released under the SIL Open Font License - please read it carefully and do not download the fonts unless you agree to the terms of the license: Copyright (c) 2003-2008 SIL International ( http://www.sil.org/), DownloadIf you agree to the terms of use (shown above), then download the fonts from the following links. Gentium Basic/Gentium Book Basic
This is the standard user distribution, including fonts that can be installed on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It does not include source files.
This is the standard source distribution, including both the fonts and source files.
This is a Debian/Ubuntu/GNU/Linux package, including only the fonts. For more details, including further installation advice and a complete source package, see the Gentium GNU/Linux page.
This is a Windows installer package containing only the fonts. We are not preparing a Mac OS 9-specific distribution. Let us know if this is a problem for you. Installation and UseDetailed hints for downloading, expanding and installing can be found here.Note that these packages only include the fonts themselves. If you want to use the fonts to type languages that use special non-European letters, then you may need a separate keyboard manager. More information on this can be found on this page: Some tools and resources for character input. Information for Developers/ContributorsThe source release contains FontLab source files for the eight fonts, but those files do not include the OpenType and Graphite code, as those are inserted after the fonts are generated from FontLab. These files included as a source for the PostScript-style cubic curves. You are welcome, however, to open the font files themselves to gain access to the smart font code, although most editors will not let you edit that code directly. We will provide a richer set of sources for the full Gentium fonts at a later time. SIL will remain as maintainers of this font project, but we do not intend any further major releases. Our primary efforts will be going into the full Gentium package. Any contributions should be directed toward that project. © 2003-2012 SIL International, all rights
reserved, unless otherwise noted elsewhere on this page. |