Fresh free Cyrillic fonts: PT Mono, ROSA Arion, ROSA Verde, Oxygen

January 9, 2012 is the last day of the January holidays in Russia. Behind not only the western, but also the Russian Orthodox date of the Nativity of Christ, as well as the New Year between them. (The only way left is to celebrate the New Year by the old style - a relic of the fallen Empire, carefully preserved by the Orthodox Church and folk tradition from the day of its abolition in 1918.) tomorrow's need for early wakefulness. And with what joyful, weighty load of free gifts do we enter the beginning of mid-January? As regards the fonts, with their answers to this question, all of us sought to please three slogans at once .

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PT Mono

The manufacturer “ParaType” on December 30, 2011 announced the release of PT Mono , a monospaced font, which naturally complements the PT font system. The project consists of the families of PT Sans and PT Serif, which appeared in 2009 and in 2010, respectively. The new font, which is interesting, has been developed with the financial participation of Google and will probably soon take its place in its Google Web Fonts collection. Like the previous works of the PT Project, the new font includes letters of not only Russian Cyrillic, but also Cyrillic writing systems of dozens of other peoples of modern Russia and a number of neighboring peoples and countries. It can also be considered free because one of its versions is distributed under the OFL license (SIL Open Font License). And here is a picture of the appearance of the font published on the website of ParaType:


It is easy to see that the novelty has almost no flaws, except, perhaps, the lowercase letter “g”, the lower notch of which is incredibly long, and the upper one is also weighty so that the difference from the “t” becomes, to me, less significant than could be.
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This font is available in a single (direct non-greasy) outline.

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ROSA Arion and ROSA Verde

Again, at the end of December on Linux.org.Ru I had the occasion to read that the related companies PingWin Software and ROSA announced that ROSA Arion and ROSA Verde fonts are available for free download on the ROSA Type website ( that is, in all characteristic dimensions, which coincide with Arial and Verdana — which means that they can replace them indiscriminately without measuring the size of the lines, paragraphs, and whole pages of text they have typed.

The ROSA Arion family consists of four styles (Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic), and ROSA Verde of three styles (Regular, Italic, Bold). The appearance of all seven is shown on a separate page of their site . For the sake of immediate illustrativeness, I will cite here also pictures of a straight face. Here is this ROSA Arion:



But ROSA Verde:



None of these free fonts can be considered completely free.

Currently, the download page states that it is allowed to “share” (“copy, distribute and transfer fonts to other persons”), as well as “use fonts” (“to create texts, blogs, websites, etc.”), but is not allowed “Include the font in any software”, as well as “process and modify the fonts” without the consent of the copyright holder. “The final version of the full legal license,” as it says, will be posted on the website later.

The discussion on Linux.org.Ru allows, however, to judge that a certain version of the “legal license” was already posted on the ROSA Type website and caused the substantial (even stormy) dissatisfaction of the user community with its extreme prohibitiveness. (Potential users mentioned, in particular, those license terms that make it impossible to use these new fonts for free in politics, in the media, in the blogosphere, in advertising, in commerce, as part of distributions, etc.). because of this displeasure, the license was removed for recycling.

A comparison of this circumstance with the September 2009 promises of PingWin Software (“the font set will be distributed under a free license”) is discouraging.

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Oxygen

On 5 January, the KDE projects development team announced the start of alpha testing of the Oxygen font family with three styles — ordinary, bold, and (suddenly!) Monospaced. They look like this:







The laid out examples of the Cyrillic alphabet show, however, that alpha - it is alpha. In the letters "y" and "d" flaws that have not yet been eliminated are noticeable:


In the discussion on Linux.org.Ru it also became clear that the alpha version fonts lack the hinting, and this is too evident in Windows.