README for Cantarell GNOME
==========================

This file provides detailed information on the Cantarell font
software. This information should be distributed along with the
Cantarell fonts and any derivative works.

Font Information
-------------------------

The Cantarell typeface family is a contemporary Humanist 
sans serif, and is used by the GNOME project for its user
interface and the Fedora project. 

Cantarell was originally designed by Dave Crossland as part 
of his coursework for the MA Typeface Design programme at 
the Department of Typography in the University of Reading, 
England. [1] 

Dave was motivated to undertake a study of typeface design because
he believes it is essential that when we use digital tools, our
freedom to use, understand, modify and share these tools is 
respected. Otherwise, when the tool does not work in the way 
that we need, we will be unable to fix it.

These fonts are developed using only such "libre" software, 
mainly FontForge [2]. 

Cantarell was originally aimed at on-screen reading in a specific 
use-case and environment: reading web pages on an HTC Dream 
mobile phone [3].

That device was the first to ship with Google Android [4], and 
came installed with a web browser that supported the exciting web 
fonts feature known as @font-face [5]. As Dave's very first typeface 
design, the typeface has many faults, yet he asserts it achieves 
his goal of improving readability on this device.

Since the design is aimed at display on-screen at small sizes, the
printed output (especially of the bold and oblique) may not work
well. Fonts tuned to the needs of printing will be developed in 
the future.

The fonts were initially published on the 6th of July 2009 on
Dave Crossland's foundry website [6] under the terms of the GNU
General Public License version 3. [7] In May 2010 the fonts were 
republished through Google Web Fonts [8] under the terms of the
SIL Open Font License version 1.1. [9] In November 2010 the
project became part of the GNOME project and is now under active
development by the GNOME design community. [10]

Dave Crossland, 21st March 2011

[1]: http://www.typedesign.reading.ac.uk
[2]: http://fontforge.sf.net
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29
[5]: http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Web_font_linking_with_%40font-face
[6]: http://abattis.org/cantarell
[7]: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
[8]: http://www.google.com/webfonts
[9]: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL
[10]: http://live.gnome.org/CantarellFonts

                                  * * * 

Developer information
---------------------
                                  
The original src/Cantarell-Regular.sfdir directory has the master
sources as Cubic (PostScript) Bezier splines. It was used to generate
Cantarell-Bold.sfdir which is now a hard fork and the bold master. Many
glyphs were imported back from Pooja Saxena's Cambay.

All development occurs by making changes to these drawing files. Produce
.otf font files with "make" at the command line. It will automatically
generate obliqued variants of the masters.

ChangeLog
-------------------------

Please refer to the GNOME Git repository changelog at this URL:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/cantarell-fonts/log/

Acknowledgements
-------------------------

Here is a list of major contributors; all contributors are listed
in the GNOME Git repository changelogs.

If you make major modifications be sure to add your name (N), email (E),
web-address (W) and description (D). This list is sorted by last name
in alphabetical order.

N: Dave Crossland
E: dave@understandinglimited.com
W: http://abattis.org/cantarell/
D: Designer - original Latin glyphs

N: Valek Filippov
E: frob@gnome.org
W: https://plus.google.com/108983215764171548842/about
D: Designer - cyrillic

N: Erik Hartenian
E: infinality@infinality.net
W: http://infinality.net
D: Connoisseur of fine font renderding

N: Pooja Saxena
E: anexasajoop@gmail.com
W: http://www.poojasaxena.in
D: Designer - New glyphs and many improvements to weight and metric balance.

N: Jakub Steiner
E: jimmac@gmail.com
W: http://jimmac.musichall.cz
D: Designer - many improvements and GNOME standards engineering

N: Nikolaus Waxweiler
E: madigens@gmail.com
W: -
D: General clean up and increased language coverage
