The font was first introduced in October 2010 with the release of Ubuntu 10.10 in four versions: Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic in English. With the release of Ubuntu 11.04 in April 2011, additional fonts and expanded language coverage were introduced.[6][7] The final development is intended to include a total of thirteen fonts, consisting of:
The monospace version, used in terminals, was initially planned to ship with Ubuntu 11.04. However, it was delayed and instead shipped with Ubuntu 11.10 as the default system monospace font.[8]
The font is fully Unicode compliant and contains Latin A and B extended character sets, Greek polytonic, and Cyrillic extended. In addition, it has become the first native operating system font to include the Indian rupee sign.[9] The font has been designed primarily for use on screen displays, and its spacing and kerning is optimized for body copy sizes.[6][10]
Usage
The Ubuntu Font Family is the default font for the current and development releases of the Ubuntu operating system and is used for the Ubuntu project branding.[5]
Ubuntu bold-italic is also used in the bitcoin logotype, alongside the bitcoin symbol.[15][16]
Ubuntu sans is the font used in the "GIF Maker" by the popular GIF sharing app Tenor, the font has become very popular in internet meme culture, being used commonly to caption GIFs and images.[17]
The Ubuntu Font License is an "interim"[19] license designed for the Ubuntu Font Family, which has used the license since version 0.68.[5] The license is based on the SIL Open Font License.[20]
The Ubuntu Font License allows the fonts to be "used, studied, modified and redistributed freely" given that the license terms are met. The license is copyleft and all derivative works must be distributed under the same license. Documents that use the fonts are not required to be licensed under the Ubuntu Font License.[21]
Fedora and Debian have reviewed this license and converged on interpreting it as non-free due to incomplete or ambiguous use and modification permissions.[18][22]
^"For anyone curious, the UI typeface is called Raleway". 28 May 2014. the OVC text is written in Ubuntu Mono: … Use of Ubuntu Mono is a really cool detail, considering that in real life Open Voting Consortium terminals are running on Linux.
^Shuttleworth, Mark. "Something New and Beautiful: Ubuntu, distilled, in type". Mark Shuttleworth blog. Retrieved 14 February 2015. So we came to the compromise of an interim license, which you can find at code.launchpad.net/+branch/ubuntu-font-licence bzr. While licence proliferation sucks, I'm optimistic we'll converge in due course.
