Four years ago I stumbled upon Raph Levien’s excellent font, Inconsolata. It was great, not just because I loved its æsthetics, but also because it opened my eyes to the nascent free/open typography movement.
For a while Inconsolata was my main programming font, but soon enough I needed Hellenic characters, so I had to switch to other fonts that offered support for them. In late autumn of 2010 I started tinkering with Inconsolata (Raph was gracious enough to offer his FontForge source under the SIL Open Font License), slowly adding Hellenic glyphs, researching its influences, studying its design.
It soon became clear to me that many of the hellenised fonts available on the market today typically follow a number of very controversial ‘designs’ and more than often end up compromising the æsthetics of the original font. This is probably due to several reasons, not least because there are very few professional font designers of Hellenic fonts that are really good and also because the few ‘successful’ hellenic fonts out there share many of their design elements between them.
Today I’m happy to release to the world the first version of Inconsolata Hellenic, an open/free font that augments the original one with Hellenic glyphs. I am not a professional font designer — and this shows. I welcome criticism and advice and I’m willing to keep working on the font, whenever possible, in the hope that — in time — it may prove to be as great a choice for a hellenic monospaced font as the original Inconsolata is for roman. It should be clear that should you decide to give it a try, keep in mind that this font is by no means final; it is merely an early version of the font. I am releasing it now so that — hopefully — both the community and I will have more reasons to make it better.
You can find a (recently generated from source) OpenType font file, usable on all three major platforms, on the Software page of this site and the FontForge source for the font in GitHub. The font is available under SIL’s Open Font License.
Enjoy!
Inconsolata Hellenic!
Update: Please check the Software page often as the font has been getting some work after this post was made. Make sure you use the latest version before reporting an issue.