Linux Libertine is a digital typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to
proprietary
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Linux Libertine contains more than 2,000
glyph
A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...
s and encompasses character sets such as the
Greek Alphabet
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as we ...
,
Cyrillic script
The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, ...
, and
Hebrew alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet ( he, wikt:אלפבית, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew languag ...
. Additionally, it offers several ligatures (such as ff, fi, and ct, and the
capital ß
Capital may refer to:
Common uses
* Capital city, a municipality of primary status
** List of national capital cities
* Capital letter, an upper-case letter Economics and social sciences
* Capital (economics), the durable produced goods used f ...
). It also includes special characters such as
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...
text figures
Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the ...
Tux
Black tie is a semi-formal wear, semi-formal Western dress code for evening events, originating in British and American conventions for clothing, attire in the 19th century. In British English, the dress code is often referred to synecdochically ...
mascot is included at the Unicode code point U+E000.
Usage
In 2010, Linux Libertine was adopted as an open-source substitute for the
Hoefler Text
Hoefler Text is an old-style serif font by Jonathan Hoefler and released by Apple Computer Inc. (now Apple Inc.) in 1991 to showcase advanced type technologies. Intended as a versatile font that is suitable for body text, it takes cues from a r ...
typeface in the redesign of the
Wikipedia logo
The logo of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, is an unfinished globe constructed from jigsaw pieces—some pieces are missing at the top—each inscribed with a glyph from a different writing system. As displayed on the web pages of the E ...
, making it possible to localize the Wikipedia identity into more than 250 languages and character sets. The "W" character, which had previously been used in various other places in Wikipedia (such as the favicon) and was a "distinctive part of the Wikipedia brand", had "crossed" V glyphs in the original logo, while Linux Libertine has a joined W letter shape. As a solution, the "crossed" W was added to Linux Libertine as an OpenType variant.
Both the Linux Libertine and Linux Biolinum typefaces are used by the open-source design publication '' Libre Graphics Magazine''.
Derivative works
László Németh created a variant of fonts with additional
Graphite
Graphite () is a crystalline form of the element carbon. It consists of stacked layers of graphene. Graphite occurs naturally and is the most stable form of carbon under standard conditions. Synthetic and natural graphite are consumed on large ...
font tables: Linux Libertine G and Linux Biolinum G. Both these fonts are bundled with
LibreOffice
LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite co ...
as of the suite's 3.3 release, with some features added in the 3.5 release.
Khaled Hosny forked the Linux Libertine font family in 2012. The fork stemmed from a lack of a matching mathematical companion font for Linux Libertine. He officially released the initial version of his fork in 2016. Due to licensing restrictions of Linux Libertine regarding the need to change the name of derivative works, he renamed his version to "Libertinus fonts". Hosny also used this opportunity to unify the various font names. Thus, Linux Libertine became Libertinus Serif, Linux Biolinum became Libertinus Sans, and Linux Libertine Mono became Libertinus Mono. His new mathematical font is called Libertinus Math. While working on the mathematical companion, Hosny fixed many technical issues of the already existing fonts. This led him to a complete fork of Linux Libertine, not just adding a complementing typeface to it. Since Linux Libertine's releases came to a halt in 2012, the actively developed Libertinus fonts are de facto a continuation of the now stalled Linux Libertine project. Khaled passed the role of maintainer on to Caleb Maclennan in 2020.
See also
*
Free software Unicode typefaces
There are Unicode typefaces which are open-source and designed to contain glyphs of all Unicode characters, or at least a broad selection of Unicode scripts. There are also numerous projects aimed at providing only a certain script, such as the ...
*
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...
*
List of typefaces
This is a list of typefaces, which are separated into groups by distinct artistic differences. The list includes typefaces that have articles or that are referenced. Superfamilies that fall under more than one category have an asterisk (*) after t ...
GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...