Quivira (typeface)
| Category | Serif proportional |
|---|---|
| Classification | Transitional |
| Designer(s) | Alexander Lange |
| Website | quivira-font.com |
Quivira is a free serif Unicode typeface by Alexander Lange in the OpenType format which is supported by every usual office program or printer. Unicode font means, it contains more than the standard characters for some western European languages.[1]
Seen from the typographic point of view, Quivira is a proportional serif font like e.g. the more well-known Times New Roman and Garamond. Thus it is suitable for writing well readable texts.
New characters are continuously added to Quivira; so it makes sense to look for new versions from time to tLime.
Latest version
The current version 4.1 contains 11,053 characters (391 of which are new since version 4.0).
New characters
- Greek and Coptic (completed, 1 new character)
- Cyrillic Supplement (completed, 8 new characters)
- Armenian (completed, 2 new characters)
- Runic (completed, 8 new characters)
- Currency Symbols (completed, 3 new characters)
- Miscellaneous Technical (completed, 7 new characters)
- Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (completed, 115 new characters)
- Supplemental Punctuation (completed, 17 new characters)
- Cyrillic Extended-B (completed, 6 new characters)
- Latin Extended-D (completed, 18 new characters)
- Latin Extended-E (complete, 50 characters)
- Private Use Area: Control Pictures Extended (6 characters)
- Ancient Greek Numbers (completed, 2 new characters)
- Ancient Symbols (completed, 1 new character)
- Old Italic (completed, 1 new character)
- Ugaritic (complete, 31 characters)
- Playing Cards (completed, 23 new characters)
- Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement (completed, 2 new characters)
- Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs (32 new characters)
- Emoticons (completed, 2 new characters)
- Geometric Shapes Extended (64 characters)
Objective
The aim of this project is a large Unicode font which still looks aesthetically pleasing. Supported scripts (like e.g. Latin, Greek and Cyrillic) shall be supported completely, so Quivira can be used for every language using these scripts.
Of course missing characters can be added from other fonts (this is what many rendering programs do automatically). This is clearly better than showing only a replacement character, but it never looks really good, because the other font certainly uses different character widths, stroke thicknesses and letter and line heights. This is where the large Unicode fonts step in: They help to avoid inappropriate glyphs in multilingual documents.
Endnotes
- ↑ "Quivira 4.1". quivira-font.com. Retrieved 2016-09-21.