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!

Prelude is the font bundled with WebOS in HP/Palm’s Palm Pre. I first saw it, and wrote about it, last summer, a bit after the device went on sale. Back then I wrote that the font was fantastic, but didn’t include any non-Roman characters. Apparently I was wrong.

Eighteen months passed since then, a time during which Palm Pre was quickly consigned to history as an interesting curiosity, Palm was acquired by HP, WebOS remained a promising, fascinating even, operating system for mobile devices. While I downloaded the WebOS SDK back in the day, I quickly lost interest given that Palm did the lousiest job bringing the Pre to Europe — it was never available in Hellas and very few carriers, electronics chains and retailers carried it throughout Europe. Subsequent variants and revisions of the device were also totally absent from the market.

I did keep an open eye, however, as I find WebOS truly interesting. The other day I read this post on the Palm Development Center Blog. Apparently Prelude now includes support for more alphabets than I previously thought. Among them was Hellenic.

Extracting the Prelude font from the emulator image is very easy, using scp after the emulator has completed booting. I tried the Prelude fonts on my main linux workstation, the machine I spend more than 85% of my time daily. The results were frighteningly bad.

Prelude is a gorgeous font, but the hellenic glyphs look ridiculously bad. They seem like they were designed by someone other than the original designer; or the original designer has no clue as to how hellenic glyphs are designed. I mean look at this lowercase omega, or that totally out of place lowercase alpha. Like a distant, uglier cousin of Futura, that got lost and found shelter in a different font. In addition to being very ugly, with absurd metrics and an æsthetic feel that’s totally different to that of the Roman glyphs in the font, the hellenic glyphs betray complete ignorance of the hellenic alphabet. Needless to say, hellenic in Prelude look like a botched, hurried job, aimed at providing the bare essential support for hellenic, probably added at the last minute, bunched together with cyrillic and eastern european glyphs, for the sole purpose of giving HP/Palm the opportunity to claim international font support in their upcoming products. In reality, hellenic characters in Prelude have very little in common to their roman counterparts. And this is a shame not only because Prelude (for roman characters) is a fantastic font, but also because fonts, contrary to software, are not iteratively designed at the rate that software is and chances are that the botched hellenic glyphs currently found in Prelude will be on HP/Palm devices for a long time to come. What a shame!