DejaVu fonts

Short description: Open-source Unicode fonts

DejaVu

Category	Serif, Sans (sans-serif), Sans Mono (monospace) variants: Bold, Oblique, Bold Oblique
Foundry	None
Date created	2004
Date released	2004
License	Bitstream Vera Fonts Copyright, Arev Fonts Copyright, Public Domain
Design based on	Bitstream Vera release 1.10
Variations	Serif Condensed, Sans Condensed
Website	dejavu-fonts.github.io

The DejaVu fonts are a superfamily of fonts designed for broad coverage of the Unicode Universal Character Set. The fonts are derived from Bitstream Vera (sans-serif) and Bitstream Charter (serif), two fonts released by Bitstream under a free license that allowed derivative works based upon them; the Vera and Charter families were limited mainly to the characters in the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement portions of Unicode, roughly equivalent to ISO/IEC 8859-15, and Bitstream's licensing terms allowed the fonts to be expanded upon without explicit authorization. The DejaVu fonts project was started with the aim to "provide a wider range of characters ... while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development". The development of the fonts is done by many contributors and is organized through a wiki and a mailing list.

The DejaVu fonts project was started by Štěpán Roh. Over time, it has absorbed several other projects that also existed to extend the Bitstream Vera typefaces; these projects include the Olwen Font Family, Bepa, Arev Fonts (only partially), and the SUSE Linux standard fonts. The full project incorporates the Bitstream Vera license, an extended MIT License, which restricts naming of modified distributions and prohibits individual sale of the typefaces, although they may be embedded within a larger commercial software package (terms also found in the later Open Font License); to the extent that the DejaVu fonts' changes can be separated from the original Bitstream Vera and Charter fonts, these changes have been deeded to the public domain.

Usage

DejaVu fonts can be obtained from the DejaVu project repo on GitHub. Some operating systems (OpenBSD, Solaris, Haiku, AmigaOS 4, Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and RHEL) include DejaVu fonts in their default installation, sometimes even using them as their system fonts. These fonts were also included in the proprietary BlackBerry OS since its version 4.5, under the names "BBAlphaSans" and "BBAlphaSerif", until they were replaced in BlackBerry 10 with Slate.

DejaVu Serif Bold was used by designer Jonathan Barnbrook in the promotional and packaging materials for Blackstar, the final album of England musician David Bowie before his death in January 2016.

DejaVu Serif

DejaVu Sans Mono

DejaVu Sans

Unicode coverage

DejaVu is a project which aims for complete coverage of the alphabetic scripts, abjads, and symbols with all characters that are part of the MES-1, MES-2, and hopefully MES-3 subsets of Unicode. The coverage is already considerable, although some more work is needed to include more hinting rules for clear results at small sizes. Some kerning rules are still being developed for the Sans and Serif styles, for fine typography. Some work is still also needed to create ligatures in these styles.

As of version 2.37, it included characters from the following Unicode blocks. (The fraction given is the number of characters in each block that are included in the DejaVu fonts.)

Plane 0: Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) Range: 0000-FFFF (0–65,535)
C0 Controls and Basic Latin (95/95)	100%	100
C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement (96/96)	100%	100
Latin Extended-A (128/128)	100%	100
Latin Extended-B (208/208)	100%	100
IPA Extensions (96/96)	100%	100
Spacing Modifier Letters (63/80)	79%	79
Combining Diacritical Marks (93/112)	83%	83
Greek and Coptic (135/135)	100%	100
Cyrillic (256/256)	100%	100
Cyrillic Supplement (38/48)	79%	79
Armenian (86/89)	96%	96
Hebrew (54/87)	62%	62
Arabic (165/255)	64%	64
N'Ko (54/59)	92%	92
Thai (1/87)	1%	1
Lao (65/67)	97%	97
Georgian (83/88)	94%	94
Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (404/640)	63%	63
Ogham (29/29)	100%	100
Phonetic Extensions (106/128)	83%	83
Phonetic Extensions Supplement (38/64)	59%	59
Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement (6/59)	10%	10
Latin Extended Additional (252/256)	98%	98
Greek Extended (233/233)	100%	100
General Punctuation (107/111)	96%	96
Superscripts and Subscripts (42/42)	100%	100
Currency Symbols (26/31)	84%	84
Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols (7/33)	21%	21
Letterlike Symbols (75/80)	94%	94
Number Forms (55/60)	92%	92
Arrows (112/112)	100%	100
Mathematical Operators (256/256)	100%	100
Miscellaneous Technical (136/255)	53%	53
Control Pictures (2/39)	5%	5
Enclosed Alphanumerics (10/160)	6%	6
Box Drawing (128/128)	100%	100
Block Elements (32/32)	100%	100
Geometric Shapes (96/96)	100%	100
Miscellaneous Symbols (189/256)	74%	74
Dingbats (174/192)	91%	91
Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A (9/48)	19%	19
Supplemental Arrows-A (16/16)	100%	100
Braille Patterns (256/256)	100%	100
Supplemental Arrows-B (128/128)	100%	100
Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B (13/128)	10%	10
Supplemental Mathematical Operators (74/256)	29%	29
Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (35/206)	17%	17
Latin Extended-C (31/32)	96%	96
Georgian Supplement (38/40)	95%	95
Tifinagh (55/59)	93%	93
Supplemental Punctuation (7/69)	10%	10
Yijing Hexagram Symbols (64/64)	100%	100
Lisu (48/48)	100%	100
Cyrillic Extended-B (33/96)	34%	34
Modifier Tone Letters (20/32)	62%	62
Latin Extended-D (77/160)	48%	48
Alphabetic Presentation Forms (58/58)	100%	100
Arabic Presentation Forms-A (108/611)	18%	18
Variation Selectors (16/16)	100%	100
Combining Half Marks (4/16)	25%	25
Arabic Presentation Forms-B (141/141)	100%	100
Specials (5/5)	100%	100
Plane 1: Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP) Range: 10000-1FFFF (65,536–131,071)
Old Italic (35/36)	97%	97
Tai Xuan Jing Symbols (87/87)	100%	100
Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols (117/996)	12%	12
Arabic Mathematical Alphabetic Symbols (74/143)	52%	52
Domino Tiles (100/100)	100%	100
Playing Cards (59/82)	72%	72
Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs (12/768)	2%	2
Emoticons (64/80)	80%	80

Styles

The 10 styles provided by the original Bitstream Vera fonts have been augmented to 21 styles:

DejaVu Sans	DejaVu Serif	DejaVu Sans Mono
Book / Oblique	Book / Italic	Book / Oblique
Bold / Oblique	Bold / Italic	Bold / Oblique
Extralight
Condensed / Oblique	Condensed / Italic
Condensed Bold / Oblique	Condensed Bold / Italic

Original styles are marked in bold.

DejaVu Sans Mono

The DejaVu Sans Mono typeface in particular is suitable for technical contexts, since it clearly distinguishes "l" (lowercase L) from "1" (one) and from "I" (uppercase i); also it clearly distinguishes "0" (zero, null) from "O" (uppercase o).

One derivative of the DejaVu Sans Mono typeface, the Menlo typeface, is provided by Apple with the Mac OS X 10.6 operating system. Another is the Hack typeface, which seeks to further-optimize DejaVu Sans Mono for programming, and which is as of 2023 the default monospace font for KDE on openSUSE.

See also

• List of typefaces
• Unicode font
• Open-source Unicode typefaces

External links

• on GitHub
• Official website-wiki archive The Wayback Machine final crawl before site was shut down
• Shankland, Stephen (2006-07-11). "Open source casts new mold for type design". CNET. http://news.cnet.com/Open-source-casts-new-mold-for-type-design/2100-7344_3-6092398.html.