
Source Sans Pro: Adobe’s first open source font family - robinhouston
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/08/source-sans-pro.html
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user49598
The 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&...](http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=OFL)

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ajross
This comes close to dancing around the Open Source Definition
(<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?

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Aloha
I 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
Well, 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?

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jonah
If 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
One 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
FWIW, OFL is an FSF-approved license <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.

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gojomo
Because 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.

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mortenjorck
A 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>

Not a bad News Gothic descendent at all. It takes News Gothic's structural
personality and adds a bit of Frutiger's humanism.

~~~
pauldhunt
The PDF specimen is on the Adobe site (793K):

<http://store1.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/1959.pdf>

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computerbob
Can 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?

~~~
apendleton
A 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
Thank you for your response. This makes much more sense. Never realized how
intense fonts were.

~~~
josephcooney
Plus, while there are a lot of 'free' fonts online most of them are licensed
such that you can't embed them in your app. From my understanding (IANAL) the
SIL open font licence DOES allow you to embed and redistribute.

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jryan49
Arch Linux packages I just created/added to AUR:

otf-source-sans-pro: <https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=61403>

ttf-source-sans-pro: <https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=61404>

~~~
gamzer
Thank you very much! I was already a bit sad when I didn't find a Source Sans
Pro package yesterday.

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devindotcom
Good 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.

~~~
pauldhunt
There's an alternate l available via OpenType features.

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kefs
Thanks for these! :) Can't wait for monospaced.

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mmariani
Beautiful fonts. Thanks for the tip! :)

Here's the download link:
[http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcesans.adobe/files/Sourc...](http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcesans.adobe/files/SourceSansPro_FontsOnly.zip/download)

~~~
WiseWeasel
For those wondering, the monospace variant is sadly not included, as it is
currently under development.

~~~
mmariani
I 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.

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tsahyt
The 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)

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jneal
Monospace is beautiful! Sad to see it's not included

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emehrkay
Im no font nerd, but this looks great

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state
There'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.

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bierko
That's a really nice monospace.

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petilon
Source 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
Not a dead ringer, but in the same category of sans serifs, for sure.

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activepeanut
Is there a font that supports both European and Asian languages available for
free anywhere?

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DASD
Can this font be self-hosted rather than use Typekit or other externally
hosted services?

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pauldhunt
Yes, it can be.

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stephanerangaya
This is really good, and great gift to the Open Source community.

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specto
So can anyone send me in a direction to use this with LaTeX?

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laconian
I await Gruber's lengthy analysis of this font.

(and the monospaced version)

~~~
julianz
It'll run something like "It's not the default font on the iPhone, therefore
it's unreadable".

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b0sk
They should atleast release the monospace as beta.

~~~
pauldhunt
It most likely will be in the next month or so, if you know where to look
(hint: pay attention to Brackets).

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nihonjon
Looks like brand marketing to me.

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moondowner
Finally a new monospaced font!:)

~~~
apendleton
Looks like they haven't released the monospace variant yet.

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pauldhunt
No, not yet.

~~~
stock_toaster
Is 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>

~~~
pauldhunt
Yes, the zero is dotted.

~~~
stock_toaster
Great! Can't wait for it. :)

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neya
Wow...its beautiful!

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drivebyacct2
I 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
You 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.

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chbrown
Uh, 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."

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JohnTHaller
SourceForge has more bandwidth (IIRC) and has mirrors all over the world. I
download from SF daily.

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phillmv
God 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.

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JohnTHaller
GitHub 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.

