The Public Type or PT Fonts are a family of free/libre fonts released from 2009 onwards, comprising PT Sans, PT Serif and PT Mono. They were commissioned from the design agency ParaType by

Rospechat The Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications (Rospechat) (russian: Федеральное агентство по печати и массовым коммуникациям России (Роспечать)) is a regulatory state agency w ...

, a department of the Russian

Ministry of Communications A Communications Ministry or Department of Communications is a ministry or other government agency charged with communication. Communications responsibilities includes regulating telecommunications, postal services, broadcasting and print media. T ...

, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of

Peter the Great Peter I ( – ), most commonly known as Peter the Great,) or Pyotr Alekséyevich ( rus, Пётр Алексе́евич, p=ˈpʲɵtr ɐlʲɪˈksʲejɪvʲɪtɕ, , group=pron was a Russian monarch who ruled the Tsardom of Russia from t ...

orthography reform A spelling reform is a deliberate, often authoritatively sanctioned or mandated change to spelling rules. Proposals for such reform are fairly common, and over the years, many languages have undergone such reforms. Recent high-profile examples ar ...

and to create a font family that supported all the different variations of

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, ...

used by the minority

languages of Russia Of all the languages of Russia, Russian, the most widely spoken language, is the only official language at the national level. There are 35 languages which are considered official languages in various regions of Russia, along with Russian. There ...

, as well as the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

. Primarily designed by

Alexandra Korolkova Alexandra Korolkova ( rus, Александра Королькова) (born 1984) is a Russian typeface designer. She was awarded the infrequently presented Prix Charles Peignot in 2013 by the Association Typographique Internationale, becoming the ...

, the family includes

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...

and

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...

designs, both with caption styles for small-print text, and a

monospaced font A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spaci ...

for use in programming. They are available under the English-language

SIL Open Font License The SIL Open Font License (or OFL in short) is one of the major open font licenses, which allows embedding, or "bundling", of the font in commercially sold products. OFL is a free and open source license. It was created by SIL International ...

; the original font, PT Sans, was also released under ParaType's own Free Font License, and regular and bold with italics is free in Google. Additional styles, such as extended, condensed and extra-bold, are sold from ParaType as PT Sans Pro and PT Serif Pro.

Features

Unofficial russian rouble sign (PT Sans 2

The fonts include

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

and

Cyrillic , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...

characters and covers almost all minority languages of the Russian Federation. The slashed-Р ruble symbol (before it became official in December 2013) is included at the U+20B9…U+20CF code points. In the most common open-source release, PT Sans and PT Serif feature regular, italic, bold and bold italic designs. They also include a caption style: this is a wider version of the typeface with a greater

x-height upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the let ...

(taller lower-case letters), designed for legibility at small font sizes and on outdoor signs. PT Sans also includes a condensed version in regular and bold without italics. In caption styles, PT Serif has a caption italic style while PT Sans has a bold version. PT Mono includes regular and bold styles. Commercial releases include for PT Sans additional light, demi-bold, extra bold and black weights, in regular, narrow, condensed and extra-condensed styles. PT Serif gains an additional 32 styles, with narrow and extended widths, black, extra-bold and demi-bold weights. The professional releases also add

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 ...

and

small caps In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. This is technicall ...

Operating system support

PT Sans is included in the Fedora Linux package repository since February 2010, in the

Gentoo Linux Gentoo Linux (pronounced ) is a Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system. Unlike a binary software distribution, the source code is compiled locally according to the user's preferences and is often optimized for the ...

repository since January 2011, and in

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

since

OS X Lion OS X Lion, also known as Mac OS X Lion, (version 10.7) is the eighth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Mac computers. A preview of OS X 10.7 Lion was publicly shown at the "Back to the Mac" Apple Speci ...

PT Astra fonts

In 2016, PT Astra Sans and PT Astra Serif fonts were developed for distribution with the Russian

Astra Linux Astra Linux is a Russian Linux-based computer operating system (OS) that is being widely deployed in the Russian Federation in order to replace Microsoft Windows. https://www.cnews.ru/news/top/2020-11-12_gosorgany_rossii_massovo https://rg.ru/202 ...

operating system. Both fonts are metrically compatible with Times New Roman. In 2021, PT Astra Fact font was developed for distribution with the Astra Linux operating system. It is metrically compatible with Verdana.

Gallery

File:PT Sans features.png, PT Sans features File:PT Serif features 1.png, PT Serif features File:PT Serif features 2.png, PT Serif features File:PT Serif cyrillic and latin letters difference.svg, PT Serif cyrillic (top) and latin (bottom) letters difference File:PT weights.png, The open-source weights of the PT font series.

References

External links

*
The post in the official ParaType blog
announcing PT Sans and telling the story of the project (in Russian)

{{OS X typefaces Unified serif and sans-serif typeface families Typefaces with optical sizes Open-source typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2009 Humanist sans-serif typefaces Transitional serif typefaces Monospaced typefaces Latin-script typefaces Cyrillic typefaces