Gentium

For other uses, see Gentium (disambiguation).

Gentium

Category	Serif
Classification	Old-style
Designer(s)	Victor Gaultney
Date created	2001
Date released	2002-09-16 (Gentium 1.00)
Characters	2,750+
Glyphs	4,500+
License	Open Font License
Variations	Gentium Basic Gentium Book Basic Gentium Book Plus Gentium Plus Gentium Plus Compact [all variants were unified in version 7]
Sample
Website	software.sil.org/gentium/
Latest release version	7.00
Latest release date	June 1, 2025 (2025-06-01)

Gentium (/ˈdʒɛntiəm/, from the Latin for "of the nations") is a Unicode serif typeface family designed by Victor Gaultney. Gentium fonts are free and open source software, and are released under the SIL Open Font License (OFL), which permits modification and redistribution. Gentium has wide support for languages using the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts, as well as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and other phonetic notation, excluding mostly paleographic and medievalist characters. Gentium includes over 4,500 glyphs and advanced typographic features through OpenType and formerly Graphite.

Gentium was designed for use at 10-11 points. Wide counters and low stroke contrast improve readability at small point sizes. Long ascenders allow diacritics stacking. In 2003, the Gentium font was awarded a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) as one of the best designs of the previous five years.

History

The original release of Gentium defined roughly 1,500 glyphs covering almost all of the range of Latin characters used worldwide, as well as monotonic and polytonic Greek, designed to flow in harmony with the Latin.

GentiumAlt

Early releases of Gentium came with a variant called GentiumAlt ("Gentium Alternative"), which contained flatter diacritics intended to improve the appearance of stacked diacritics, which might otherwise overstrike adjacent lines of text, as well as a glyph variant of the Greek circumflex that resembled an inverted breve. These features are now handled as stylistic variants within the main font.

Gentium Basic

In November 2007, the Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts were released, containing Gentium fonts in four faces: regular, italic, bold, and bold italic. Gentium Basic has the same weight as the previous Gentium fonts, while Gentium Book Basic is set at a slightly heavier weight for use in publishing books at small point sizes, or under certain printing conditions. While these fonts contain bold and bold italic variants, they do not contain the full range of glyphs, especially most Greek letters.

Gentium Plus

An updated version of the roman and italic fonts called Gentium Plus, which includes the full extended Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic coverage, was released in November 2010. Gentium Plus variants containing an additional 3,800 glyphs, including Cyrillic and additional coverage of the IPA, were added in 2010 in a release called Gentium Plus. Released shortly afterward was a variant called "Gentium Plus Compact", which has compact spacing for aesthetic reasons. Both Gentium Plus and Gentium Plus Compact include regular and italic variants of over 5500 glyphs.

Since the initial release of the Gentium Plus fonts, the focus of the project has shifted to completing bold and bold italic weights of the Gentium Plus family, as well as the creation of a "Gentium Book Plus" family with a slightly heavier weight which may be useful at small sizes.

Gentium 7

Gentium version 7, released in June 2025, was a major update, unifying Gentium Plus, Gentium Basic and Gentium Book into a single set of fonts. The unified Gentium now has five font weights, with the Gentium Book and Gentium Book bold weights continued as Gentium medium and Gentium extra-bold. [Also available is semi-bold.] Limited kerning was introduced, primarily for IPA letters with hooks. The line spacing was changed to be intermediate between those of Gentium Plus and Gentium Compact. The internal naming was also changed so that Gentium 6,2 and Gentium 7 can be installed on the same system, as converting a document from Gentium 6,2 to Gentium 7 will cause repagination due to the difference in line spacing and the introduction of kerning.

Character variants

Gentium Book Plus font with 'a' and 'g' set to primer style

Andika font with two features selected

Variant forms of many characters can be chosen in the word-processor. For example, for primer-style 'a' and 'g', append ss01=1 to the name of the font in the font-selection window. (Features are appended with a colon and linked with an ampersand – see images at right.)

Features that may be chosen include small capitals, primer-style 'a' and 'g', roman-style 'a' and 'g' in italic typeface, variant forms of capital 'Ŋ', large modifier letter apostrophe and saltillo, Vietnamese-style diacritics, Serbian-style italics (in Cyrillic), staveless tone letters, old-style digits, and automatic fractions.

For version 6,2 and earlier, customized versions of the fonts that have these features preset can be created prior to download.

Open source development

The ongoing development of the font welcomes requests and contributions from its users. Gentium was released under the Open Font License on November 28, 2005. Older serif typefaces that support the same character inventory, and also released under the OFL, are Charis SIL and Doulos SIL.

See also

• Free software Unicode typefaces

External links

• Gentium — a typeface for the nations
• SIL Open Font License (OFL)
• Gentium for LaTeX: package
• TypeTuner Web homepage