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TypoPRO

TypoPRO

http://typopro.org/

Fonts for Professional Typography — The Non-Cloud Way!

TypoPRO is a carefully hand-selected collection of freely usable professional fonts for use in Desktop Publishing (DTP), on Websites and especially inside Web-based Desktop or Mobile Applications. Currently, TypoPRO consists of 1933 individual fonts of 200 font families. The fonts in total span a very wide range of font types, font styles, font weights and font variants. This way, TypoPRO provides a magnitude of typographic possibilities with just a minimum number of font families.

Features

  • Preselection & Assembling: The fonts were carefully hand-selected, manually downloaded and consistently assembled into the TypoPRO collection. For many fonts the real upstream vendor origin of their latest versions had to be determined first, too.

  • Glyph Design: All fonts are professionally crafted and have their glyphs (individual characters) beautifully designed and this way provide a really wonderful optical appearance. Most of the fonts are actually from professional font foundries.

  • Font Families: Most of the fonts are based on reasonably large font families of individual fonts. This is important, because for professional typography results you usually always need multiple weights of at least the headline and text fonts.

  • Kerning: Most of the fonts carry reasonable kerning information, provided by the font foundry: instructions for spacing adjustments between particular pairs of glyphs. This is important, because for professional typography, kerning is essential.

  • Hinting: All fonts carry reasonable hinting information, provided by the conversion process (and its ttfautohint utility) of TypoPRO: display instructions for rasterization adjustments at various rendering sizes. This is important, because for rendering fonts on the Web at very small sizes, hinting is essential.

  • Liberal Licensing: All fonts are under very liberal Open Source licenses and can be freely and unrestrictively used even in Closed Source and Commercial contexts.

  • Web Conversion: All fonts are consistently converted from their original TTF/OTF format into various font formats for use on the Web: Embedded OpenType (EOT), Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and TrueType Font (TTF). These different formats for each font are required for maximum portability across browsers and operating systems. Suitable corresponding CSS @font-face declaration files were generated, too.

  • Unicode Character Reduction Some fonts contain a really large number of glyphs, covering a wide range of the Unicode character set. This is great in general, but dramatically increases the font size, which is a major drawback on the web. For this reason, although it reduces the fonts to be used for the main Latin based languages (English, German, etc), we reduce the fonts in web formats to the smaller Unicode range 0000-00FF (Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement). For the DTP formats of all fonts we reduce to the larger (but still reduced for some very large fonts) Unicode range set 0000-036F,1DC0-1EFF,2000-20FF,2150-218F,2C60-2C7F,A720-A7FF (Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, IPA Extensions, Spacing Modifier Letters, Combining Diacriticals Marks, Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement, Latin Extended Additional, General Punctuation. Superscripts and Subscripts, Currency Symbols, Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols, Number Forms, Latin Extended-C, Latin Extended-D)

  • Font Renaming: To circumvent license restrictions related to font format conversions and to avoid confusion with the original font formats, all Web and DTP font format variants were renamed to consistently carry the TypoPRO prefix.

  • Font Parameters: In the Web font format variants, all font families consistently use a common font family name (CSS font-family attribute) and all fonts within the same font family are consistently distinguished via CSS parameters font-weight, font-style, font-stretch and font-variant.

  • Specimen: For the Web font variants, a specimen in HTML format was generated to conveniently preview the font. See http://typopro.org/specimen/ for the current overview of all specimens in TypoPRO.

Font Overview

A Specimen in HTML format allows you to conveniently preview all the TypoPRO font in detail. This Specimen is grouped into General Purpose and Special Purpose fonts.

General Purpose Fonts

The fonts in the General Purpose group are for general uses, i.e., they can be used equally well for headlines, body text, footnotes, etc. They especially are part of whole font families and cover a wide range of Unicode characters.

Special Purpose Fonts

The fonts in the Special Purpose group are for special uses, i.e., they are usually used only for particular headlines, subtitles, tags, etc. They are usually just stand-alone fonts and cover just a very limited range of Unicode characters.

Browser Support

All major browsers are fully supported by TypoPRO due to the fact that each font is provided in multiple Web formats. The actual minimum browser version which supports a particular format follows (for latest information see 1 2 3):

Browser EOT TTF WOFF
Internet Explorer (Desktop) 6.0 9.0 9.0
Internet Explorer (Mobile) -- -- 10.0
Mozilla Firefox (Desktop) -- 3.5 3.6
Mozilla Firefox (Mobile) -- 26.0 26.0
Google Chrome (Desktop) -- 4.0 5.0
Google Chrome (Mobile 2) -- 33.0 33.0
Google Chrome (Mobile 1) -- 2.2 4.4
Apple Safari (Desktop) -- 3.1 5.1
Apple Safari (Mobile) -- 4.2 5.0
Opera (Desktop) -- 10.0 11.1
Opera (Mobile) -- 10.0 11.0

This means that for the latest versions of all major browsers the optimized WOFF format would be both sufficient and preferred. But for backward compatibility to older browser versions, the EOT and TTF formats are still provided, too.

Notice: The fonts are intentionally not provided in the additional browser-supported SVG font format. The reason simply is that since a longer time this gives not really any additional effective cross-browser compatibility and just unnecessarily increases the (already rather large) TypoPRO distribution size.

Notice: The fonts are intentionally still not provided in the newer WOFF2 format as support for this format is still limited and although WOFF2 fonts are better compressed, this is no great advantage as long as we still have to ship WOFF format, too.

Alternatives

Nowadays, most of the fonts can also be individually downloaded for free from online font libraries like Font Squirrel, DaFont, Fonts2U or fontsc or even on-the-fly used from font Cloud services like Google Fonts, Open Font Library, Adobe Edge Web Fonts, Adobe Typekit, FontDeck or Brick. But the purpose of TypoPRO is just different: it provides an offline solution and it intentionally is a very opinionated pre-selection of reasonable (meaning high-quality) fonts.

Download

You can conveniently download latest snapshot or particular versions of TypoPRO with the Node Package Manager (NPM):

$ npm install typopro             # latest     version
$ npm install [email protected]       # particular version

This automatically installs the peer packages typopro-web and typopro-dtp, too. As you usually need only the Web formats, you can install just this NPM package:

$ npm install typopro-web         # latest     version
$ npm install [email protected]   # particular version

Alternatively, install just the DTP formats:

$ npm install typopro-dtp         # latest     version
$ npm install [email protected]   # particular version

Finally, you can also download both Web and DTP formats manually, with e.g. cURL:

# download Web formats in latest or particular version
$ curl -O https://github.com/rse/typopro-web/archive/master.zip
$ curl -O https://github.com/rse/typopro-web/archive/4.2.6.zip

# download DTP formats in latest or particular version
$ curl -O https://github.com/rse/typopro-dtp/archive/master.zip
$ curl -O https://github.com/rse/typopro-dtp/archive/4.2.6.zip

Additionally, you can also use Grunt and my companion Grunt-TypoPRO task for conveniently installing TypoPRO font families.

Desktop Usage

The DTP variants of all fonts you can find under dtp/ in the typopro-dtp package. Just install those files into your system:

  • For Windows: For single and bulk installs, right-click one or more *.ttf files and choose "Install" from the context menu.

  • For Mac OS X: For single installs, open the *.ttf file with the Font Book app and choose "Install Font". For bulk installs drag & drop the fonts into the Fonts folder of the Library folder in the Finder app.

  • For GNU/Linux: For single installs, open the *.ttf file with the Font Viewer app and choose "Install". For bulk installs copy the *.ttf files into /usr/local/share/fonts/truetype folder of your system and run sudo fc-cache.

Web Usage

The Web variants of all fonts you can find under web/ in the typopro-web package.

It is important that the font files are delivered to the browser with the correct MIME content-types. You can use the following Apache .htaccess configuration snippet to achieve this:

#   provide reasonable MIME content-types
<IfModule mime_module>
    AddType application/vnd.ms-fontobject eot
    AddType application/font-woff         woff
    AddType application/x-font-ttf        ttf
</IfModule>

#   compress all fonts (except already compressed WOFF)
<IfModule deflate_module>
    AddOutputFilter DEFLATE eot ttf
</IfModule>

In order to use an individual font you have to use two steps:

  1. Include the @font-face based CSS font declaration:

    <html>
    <head>
        [...]
        <link href="web/TypoPRO-Lora/TypoPRO-Lora-Regular.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
        [...]
    </head>
    [...]
</html>

  2. Use CSS to apply it to some of your HTML elements:

    <html>
    <head>
        [...]
        <style type="text/css">
            .sample {
                font-family: "TypoPRO Lora";
                font-weight: bold;
                font-size: 14pt;
            }
        </style>
        [...]
    </head>
    <body>
    [...]
        <div class="sample">The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog</div>
    [...]
    </body>
</html>

Recommendation

For general purpose typography, I can recommend you all of the General Purpose fonts of TypoPRO, of course. But my personal preference most of the times is towards the fonts in the following table. There are many reasons for this, but mainly all those fonts, each in their class, in my humble opinion, provide the best balance of legibility (because of very distinct glyph outlines), beauty (because of very harmonic glyph curves) and versatility (because of their different available stroke widths and optional italic variants).

Sans Serif: Slab Serif: Serif: Monospaced: Script: Display:
Fira Sans Roboto Slab Merriweather DejaVu Sans Mono Handlee Bebas Neue
Roboto Aleo Droid Serif Source Code Pro Journal Overlock
Source Sans Pro Bitter Lora Anonymous Pro Delius Yanone Kaffesatz
Open Sans Andada Source Serif Pro Latin Modern Mono Kalam Poetsen
Lato Crete Round Libre Baskerville Fira Mono Nautilus Pompilius Quando
    Petrona Inconsolata Arima Madurei Sansita
    Gelasio JetBrains Mono    

Manifest

The TypoPRO distribution consists primarily of three content areas:

  • package typopro: the meta information
  • package typopro-web, folder web/: all font target files for Web (World Wide Web) usage (formats: TTF, EOT, WOFF)
  • package typopro-dtp, folder dtp/: all font target files for DTP (Desktop Publishing) usage (formats: TTF)
  • package typopro-src, folder src/: all font source files (formats: TTF, OTF)

All source files are as provided by the upstream font vendor, just with filenames aligned to the usual TypoPRO conventions. For the DTP and Web targets, the fonts are subsetted (see "Unicode Character Reduction" above), renamed and format converted.

Rebuilding

Rebuilding the Web and DTP format files is not easy, because in order to rebuild the web/ and dtp/ files from the src/ files, you have to use the etc/convert.sh script, which needs Ralf S. Engelschall's fontface utility, as provided by the OpenPKG package fontface, and a magnitude of backend programs for font conversion: FontForge, font-optimizer and ttf2eot. On installing the OpenPKG fontface package, the dependencies are installed automatically. If you want to rebuild without using OpenPKG, you have to fiddle around with all dependencies yourself, of course.

Licensing

Copyright © 2013-2024 Dr. Ralf S. Engelschall <[email protected]>

All included font families are distributed under very liberal Open Source licenses, either MIT License, Apache License, Open Font License or Public Domain. For particular license details on each individual font family, please see the files src/*/license.txt and the meta information in the files src/*/blurb.txt in the typopro-src package.

Author

Dr. Ralf S. Engelschall
http://engelschall.com
[email protected]