Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Crimson Text


Hey, it can be the unpackaged open font of the week, and some weeks just don’t have fonts, right? 🙂
Crimson Text is a traditional, Garamond-inspired serif font family meant for use, as upstream terms it, a “workhorse” font that could be used generally, including flourishes, small caps, symbols, etc. The font is a lovely example of an in-progress international open font project, as it’s being creating by a team of folks:

  • Sebastian Kosch, a 21-year old German student studying in Toronto;
  • Hector Haralambous, who is from Greece;
  • Georg Duffner, who is from Vienna

Crimson Text is licensed under the Open Font License.
Note that as the upstream homepage indicates, the font is under heavy development and in particular the kerning is a little dicey. While you may not want to lay out documents using this font in its current state, the typeface is certainly suitable for custom type designs for logos and the like if you’re up for adjusting the kerning manually. This is definitely an interesting project to follow.
Oh! And as far as coverage… it’s already better than some of the other fonts we’ve featured here, although the creators will have you know it’s far from complete. Here’s a screenshot of some of the character map under Latin:

So, you want to package Crimson Text?

Hot doggin’! You’re groovy! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

Last week’s font

We didn’t have a font last week. 🙂 It’s been a while! Maybe I should do a blog post summarizing the state of all the previously-blogged fonts and check in on them. What do you think?

4 Comments

  1. Kevin says:

    It appears this font might already be in koji, but has been abandoned.
    http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?pa

    1. Cool! That should make it easier for someone wanting to package it now to make it happen. Thanks for the pointer!

  2. Christopher Thielen says:

    Will this ‘Unpackaged Open Font of the Week’ series continue?

    1. mairin says:

      Yes, lol, I have one in the queue! The ‘week’ part is such a joke though isn’t it 🙂

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