Utopia is the name of a transitional

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 ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of type ...

Robert Slimbach Robert Joseph Slimbach is Principal Type Designer at Adobe, Inc., where he has worked since 1987. He has won many awards for his digital typeface designs, including the rarely awarded Prix Charles Peignot from the Association Typographique Inter ...

and released by

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...

in 1989.

Design

Utopia qualifies as a transitional serif typeface: one based on 18th- and early-19th-century ideals of classical design. Adobe's release notes cite

Baskerville Baskerville is a serif typeface designed in the 1750s by John Baskerville (1706–1775) in Birmingham, England, and cut into metal by punchcutter John Handy. Baskerville is classified as a Serif#Transitional, transitional typeface, intended as a ...

and

Walbaum Walbaum is a German surname. Notable people with the surname include: *Johann Julius Walbaum (1724–1799), German physician, naturalist and taxonomist * Johannes Walbaum (born 1987), German footballer * Justus Erich Walbaum (1768-1837), German typ ...

as influences, and Adobe's Sumner Stone has also compared it to

Hermann Zapf Hermann Zapf (; 8 November 1918 – 4 June 2015) was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include Pa ...

's Melior. It was one of the first typefaces to be part of Adobe's Originals programme, designed to feature a large range of styles for professional use. With a reasonably solid design, Utopia was sometimes used by newspapers. Current versions of the typeface are released in the

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark o ...

format and include features such as ligatures and

small capitals In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are grapheme, characters typeset with glyphs that resemble letter case, uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding letter case, lowercase letters ...

. It is released in four optical variants, for display, headline, regular and caption text sizes, each in regular, semibold and bold weights. A black (extra-bold) weight is available in the headline size. Slimbach made some changes to the font when revisiting it for the OpenType release, and Adobe does not guarantee identical character metrics. This means documents developed using one font file should not be switched to using another, at risk of lines breaking in different places.

Free software release

Uniquely for Adobe's professional typefaces, a basic set of Utopia's styles has been open-sourced by Adobe, allowing it to be used for free. This comprises regular, italic, bold and bold italic styles of the regular size, with 229 glyphs for each, including ligatures but not small capitals. Adobe donated the Utopia typeface (in the form of

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

Type 1 files) to the

X Consortium The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...

, for use in the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...

, a popular graphical environment for

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

workstations. Conversions of the Type 1 files to ttf and otf files have also been made. This release is designed for use at small text sizes, with a large

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 ...

and quite thick stroke widths. Adobe retains rights to the Utopia name, and prohibits modified fonts from being redistributed without the name being changed. The OpenType version that Adobe now distributes commercially was modified from the open-sourced

fonts, and Adobe does not guarantee that the font metrics are the same.

Initial donation to the X Consortium

There was controversy around the license regarding the status of the font files as

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

. Many distributors (with one of the prominent being the

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

project), to prevent being sued, opted to state clearly that the fonts had a non-clear license which prevented it from being freely redistributable with modifications. After considerable debate, Adobe formally donated the Type 1 version of the font, on October 11, 2006, to the

TeX Users Group Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

(TUG), with clarified concerns regarding its use licensing, so that it could be used with, for instance,

Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer sc ...

's program

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

, a digital typesetting system for computers. The version donated consisted of the Roman (Regular), Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic versions of the typeface, differently from the commercial version offered as part of the Adobe Originals Pack. On November 17, 2006,

Karl Berry Karl may refer to: People * Karl (given name), including a list of people and characters with the name * Karl der Große, commonly known in English as Charlemagne * Karl Marx, German philosopher and political writer * Karl of Austria, last Austri ...

, the TeX Users Group President, gave irrevocable permissions of the font to any third party and it constitutes free software.

Derived typefaces

The original Utopia typeface has, since being released as free software, been modified to support

glyphs 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 ...

scripts Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...

other than the basic Latin script: at least three projects have emerged from the sources that Adobe has donated, one being an adaptation to Vietnamese, called Vntopia, by

Hàn Thế Thành __NOTOC__ The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Knuth's typesetting program TeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by Hàn Thế Thành as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of I ...

. Another further development of the original was made by Andrey V. Panov, in an

derivative called Heuristica (also: "Эвристика"), with the primary intent of adding

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

symbols. Andrey has also incorporated Hàn Thế Thành's Vietnamese glyphs in Heuristica and the development of the project is open. From the Heuristica font family, Andreas Nolda created Utopia Nova font family in 2015, changing this reserved name to Lingua Franca

and

Web Open Font Format The Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is a font format for use in web pages. WOFF files are OpenType or TrueType fonts, with format-specific compression applied and additional XML metadata added. The two primary goals are first to distinguish font fi ...

fonts in 2016. Andreas Nolda added proportional figures and a stylistic set with longer slashes, matching the parentheses in height and depth to Lingua Franca OpenType and Web Open Font Format fonts. In 2016 Stefan Peev created Linguistics Pro font family as a fork of Nolda's Utopia Nova. Linguistics Pro contains two models of Cyrillic glyphs. The base range of the Cyrillic glyphs (uni0410:uni044F) represents the modern Bulgarian letterform model. The traditional Cyrillic letterform model is included as a local feature for Russian language and as a Stylistic Set 01. Stylistic Set 02 is for Serbian and Macedonian texts (in Regular and Bold variants) and for Serbian texts in Italic and Bold Italic variants. Stylistic Set 03 is for Macedonian texts (in Italic and Bold variants). Linguistics Pro also contains polytonic Greek.

Lawsuit

From 1995 to 1997, Adobe filed several complaints against Southern Software, Inc. regarding the latter company's use of the Utopia font, under the name "Veracity", in its products. In 1998, the

United States District Court for the Northern District of California The United States District Court for the Northern District of California (in case citations, N.D. Cal.) is the federal United States district court whose jurisdiction comprises the following counties of California: Alameda, Contra Costa, Del ...

ruled in favor of Adobe, finding that Southern Software, Inc.'s font software infringed Adobe's copyright. Although typefaces are held to be unprotectable by copyright under United States copyright law, the court found that the control points used by the font software to generate the typeface were protectable.

References

External links

Adobe's current professional release of Utopia in optical sizes

Adobe's standard release of Utopia, without optical sizes

Adobe's licensing page for Utopia for website use

Utopia available for free download
(note: these are .pfa files and may require conversion to be installable on your system)
Ghostscript release in otf and ttf formats

Utopia open-source license
{{Free software typefaces Transitional serif typefaces Adobe typefaces Typefaces with optical sizes Open-source typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1989 Typefaces designed by Robert Slimbach