Gentium (, from the Latin for "of the nations") is a Unicode serif typeface family designed by Victor Gaultney. Gentium fonts are free software and open source software, and are released under the SIL Open Font License (OFL), which permits modification and redistribution.
History
The original release of
Gentium defined roughly 1,500
covering almost all of the range of
Latin alphabet characters used worldwide, as well as monotonic and polytonic Greek, designed to flow in harmony with the Latin.
GentiumAlt
Early releases of Gentium came with a variant called
GentiumAlt ("Gentium Alternative"), which contained flatter
intended to improve the appearance of stacked diacritics, which might otherwise overstrike adjacent lines of text, as well as a glyph variant of the Greek circumflex that resembled an
inverted breve. These features are now handled as stylistic variants within the main font.
Gentium Basic
In November 2007, the Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts were released, containing Gentium fonts in four faces: regular, italic, bold, and bold italic. Gentium Basic has the same weight as the previous Gentium fonts, while Gentium Book Basic is set at a slightly heavier weight for use in publishing books at small point sizes, or under certain printing conditions.
While these fonts contain bold and bold italic variants, they do not contain the full range of glyphs, especially most Greek letters.
Gentium Plus
An updated version of the roman and italic fonts called
Gentium Plus, which includes the full extended Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic coverage, was released in November 2010. Gentium Plus variants containing an additional 3,800 glyphs, including Cyrillic and additional coverage of the IPA, were added in 2010 in a release called
Gentium Plus. Released shortly afterward was a variant called "Gentium Plus Compact", which has compact spacing for aesthetic reasons. Both Gentium Plus and Gentium Plus Compact include regular and italic variants of over 5500 glyphs.
After the initial release of the Gentium Plus fonts, the focus of the project shifted to completing bold and bold italic weights of the Gentium Plus family, as well as the creation of the Gentium Book Plus family with a slightly heavier weight that was useful at large type sizes.
Gentium 7
Gentium version 7, released in June 2025, was a major update, unifying Gentium Plus, Gentium Basic and Gentium Book into a single set of fonts. The unified Gentium now has five font weights, with the Gentium Book regular and bold weights continued as Gentium medium and Gentium extra-bold. (Also available is semi-bold.) Kerning was expanded from Gentium Basic, primarily for IPA letters with hooks; it is expansive but applies to large sets of characters rather than to individual characters. The spacing of IPA tie bars was adjusted for ascenders and descenders – or the lack thereof – but in the case of the under-tie, this does not work with letters where diacritics tuck up behind the descender, namely
p,
q,
y and letters with a retroflex hook. The 9-pitch intonation contours were removed from the PUA. The line spacing was changed to be intermediate between those of Gentium Plus and Gentium Compact. The internal naming was also changed so that Gentium 6.2 and Gentium 7 could be installed on the same system, as converting a document from Gentium 6.2 to Gentium 7 would cause repagination due to the difference in line spacing and the introduction of kerning.
[ Gentium Release 7.000, 03 June 2025]
Character variants
Variant forms of many characters can be chosen in the word-processor. For example, for primer-style 'a' and 'g', append ss01=1 to the name of the font in the font-selection window.
[ (Features are appended with a colon and linked with an ampersand – see images at right.)
]
Features that may be chosen include , primer-style 'a' and 'g', roman-style 'a' and 'g' in italic typeface, variant forms of capital 'Ŋ', large modifier letter apostrophe and saltillo, Vietnamese-style diacritics, Serbian-style italics (in Cyrillic), staveless and . Small capitals, superscript and subscript are also available; they display better than HTML formatting and are distinct from the fractions triggered by the fraction slash U+2044.
For version 6,2 and earlier, customized versions of the fonts that have these features preset can be created prior to download.[ TypeTuner Web homepage]
Open source development
The ongoing development of the font welcomes requests and contributions from its users.
See also
-
Free software Unicode typefaces
External links
