Source Sans Pro: Adoption and development to date

Since the launch of Source Sans Pro just over two months ago, it has been encouraging to us to see its adoption in places such as the text font on the popular social news site, Digg, and incorporated as part of Stanford University’s identity guidelines for digital media. Part of the reason that we care about adoption is that we hope that as others want to use these fonts, they will also help to develop this type family to cover an expanding range of use cases.

Logos Bible Software 5 interface featuring Source Sans Pro

Logos Bible Software 5 interface featuring Source Sans Pro

In fact, we recently had our first collaborative experience to extend the functionality of Source Sans. Not long after the fonts’ release, Logos Bible Software contacted us with a list of features which they indicated interest in helping to develop. Today Logos is launching the latest version of their bible study application and they have switched to using Source Sans as the main type for the user interface. In speaking about why Logos decided to make this change to their UI design, Bob Pritchet, CEO of Logos Bible Software, remarks, “Source Sans is a beautiful and uniquely useful type family with multiple weights, a rich set of glyphs, strong OpenType feature support, and most importantly, an open source license that allows us to extend it for specific needs, like scholarly text-critical apparatuses and ancient scripts.”

Source Sans Pro small capitals

Source Sans Pro small capitals

Before Logos was able to switch to Source Sans, they wanted to add small capitals and superscript capitals to the fonts, as these are used extensively throughout their application. In order to help make this happen, Logos hired type designer Marc Weymann to work on the glyphs needed for these features. The work done by Logos enabled us to add small capitals to Source Sans much sooner than we would have been able to otherwise. We are grateful to Logos for helping to make enhancements to the type family that can benefit everyone and hope to continue to collaborate with them to enhance its feature set. To access the small capitals and other new features, you will need to download the latest version of the fonts (version 1.038) from GitHub.

The next items on our roadmap for the development of Source Sans include the addition of Greek and Cyrillic scripts, which are currently in process. Also we are getting some interest from individuals who would like to help add support for the International Phonetic Alphabet. If you would like to get involved in the development of this project, please get in touch using the contact information in our roadmap documentation.

Note: We have updated some links in this post for clarity; Adobe open source projects are hosted on GitHub, but no longer on SourceForge. (10/23/2014)

5 Responses

  1. plumbing says:

    In fact, Google intends to make Adobe’s new typeface available in its Google Documents and Presentations web apps as part of an update to its font selection.

  2. Aman Goyal says:

    Hi,
    We are facing a bit problem in using ‘Source Sans Pro Semi Bold’ font.
    We are using font weight – 600 and font size 14 pixels, and it is not showing the exact output as it is giving in the Illustrator. But, if we increase the font size to 18 pixels, it starts working correctly. However, it is also showing the exact output if the font is already installed in the user’s system.

    Please help regarding this.

    1. Paul D. Hunt says:

      Where exactly are you using the fonts where you are experiencing issues? Also can you more clearly describe what the nature of the issue is that you’re experiencing?

  3. Vesel says:

    Paul,
    really good job on Source Sans Pro! Small caps are a great addition to the family and it’s good that small-cap numerals and ampersand were also included. The only thing missing now is the case-sensitive punctuation.

    I have a question – I’d like to use Source Sans small caps as a webfont, would it be possible to add them as a separate webfont style (since most browsers don’t support OpenType features yet)?

    1. Paul D. Hunt says:

      Vesel, thanks for your kind note. If you would, can you please log a specific request regarding which case-sensitive punctuation you are interested in our issue tracker on GitHub? Thanks. https://github.com/adobe/source-sans-pro/issues

      Regarding separate small capitals fonts, we will not be creating such fonts. However, if you need this functionality you can edit the fonts as you need to, just change the font names before serving them on the web, please. Also, many modern browsers DO support OpenType features, including FireFox and Chrome. Which browser are you interested in that does not have this functionality?

Comments are closed.

Paul D. Hunt

Typeface designer & font developer at Adobe. Connoisseur of language, culture and design. Proponent of emoji and gender inclusivity.

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