Gentium (, from the

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

for "of the nations") is a

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

serif

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

family designed by Victor Gaultney. Gentium fonts are free and

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

software, and are released under the SIL Open Font License (OFL), which permits modification and redistribution. Gentium has wide support for languages using the

, Greek, and

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

scripts, as well as the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

(IPA) and other phonetic notation, excluding mostly paleographic and medievalist characters. Gentium includes over 4,500

glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

s and advanced typographic features through OpenType and formerly

Graphite Graphite () is a Crystallinity, crystalline allotrope (form) of the element carbon. It consists of many stacked Layered materials, layers of graphene, typically in excess of hundreds of layers. Graphite occurs naturally and is the most stable ...

. 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

s covering almost all of the range of

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

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

s 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 Inverse or invert may refer to: Science and mathematics * Inverse (logic), a type of conditional sentence which is an immediate inference made from another conditional sentence * Additive inverse, the inverse of a number that, when added to the ...

. 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 In science and engineering, the weight of an object is a quantity associated with the gravitational force exerted on the object by other objects in its environment, although there is some variation and debate as to the exact definition. Some sta ...

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 regular and bold weights continued as Gentium medium and Gentium extra-bold. lso available is semi-bold.Limited kerning was introduced, primarily for IPA letters with hooks. The spacing of IPA tie bars was adjusted for ascenders and descenders – or the lack thereof – but in the case of the under-tie, this does not work with letters where diacritics tuck up behind the descender, namely ''p'', ''q'', ''y'' and letters with a retroflex hook. 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 could be installed on the same system, as converting a document from Gentium 6.2 to Gentium 7 would cause repagination due to the difference in line spacing and the introduction of kerning.

Character variants

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.TypeTuner Web homepage
/ref>

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.

References

External links

Gentium — a typeface for the nationsSIL Open Font License (OFL)
*Gentium for

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...

packageTypeTuner Web homepage
{{Free and open-source typography Old style serif typefaces Free software Unicode typefaces Greek typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2001