The new Ubuntu font that Canonical commissioned typeface designers Dalton Maag to develop for the Ubuntu operating system has landed in Ubuntu 10.10 for all users.
The font, which has been under development for almost 9 months, was only previously accessible through a limited beta program which saw Ubuntu members and Canonical employees gain access to the font for exclusive testing.
Whether the font would land in Maverick Meerkat in time for final release come October 10th came under doubt earlier this month when a discussion arose on a bug report, with Mark Shuttleworth suggesting to defer the font usage till Ubuntu 11.04, next year.
Only a few days later and Bruno Maag confirmed that the font would indead land in time for Ubuntu 10.10’s release this October.
“No, there will be no font delay as far as I know. The core fonts are still on track to be released with Maverick, containing Latin A+B Ext, Greek Polytonic and Cyrillic Extended.”
The package in Maverick Meerkat is called ttf-ubuntu-font-family and should be installed by default after an update today. The package description reads:
The Ubuntu Font Family are a set of matching new libre/open fonts in development during 2010–2011. The development is being funded by Canonical Ltd on behalf the wider Free Software community and the Ubuntu project. The technical font design work and implementation is being undertaken by Dalton Maag.
Both the final font Truetype/OpenType files and the design files used to produce the font family are distributed under an open licence and you are expressly encouraged to experiment, modify, share and improve.
A new website, font.ubuntu.com, has been created to support the font. It contains links to relevant areas, such as documentation, testing, bug reporting and the Canonical design blog. The site also lists current and future languages and variations, and alludes to future types, evidently the Ubuntu font is going to be fleshed out into an entire family.
Regular, Bold, Italic, Bold-Italic, Light, Medium, Monospace, Condensed…