| Public Type fonts | |
| Style: | Font superfamily |
| Classifications: | Humanist sans-serif Transitional serif Monospaced font |
| Creator: | Alexandra Korolkova with Olga Umpelova and Vladimir Yefimov |
| Commissioned By: | Rospechat |
| Foundry: | ParaType |
| License: | SIL Open Font License or ParaType Free Font License |
| Creationdate: | 2009 |
| Releasedate: | 13 January 2010[1] |
The Public Type or PT Fonts are a family of free and open-source fonts released from 2009 onwards, comprising PT Sans, PT Serif and PT Mono. They were commissioned from the design agency ParaType by Rospechat, a department of the Russian Ministry of Communications, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Peter the Great's orthography reform and to create a font family that supported all the different variations of Cyrillic script used by the minority languages of Russia, as well as the Latin alphabet.[1] [2]
Primarily designed by Alexandra Korolkova, the family includes sans-serif and serif designs, both with caption styles for small-print text, and a monospaced font for use in programming. They are available under the English-language SIL Open Font License; the original font, PT Sans, was also released under ParaType's own Free Font License, and regular and bold with italics is free in Google.[3] Additional styles, such as extended, condensed and extra-bold, are sold from ParaType as PT Sans Pro and PT Serif Pro.[4] [5]
The fonts include Latin and Cyrillic characters and covers almost all minority languages of the Russian Federation. The slashed-Р ruble symbol (before it became official in December 2013) is included at the U+20B9…U+20CF code points.
In the most common open-source release, PT Sans and PT Serif feature regular, italic, bold and bold italic designs. They also include a caption style: this is a wider version of the typeface with a greater x-height (taller lower-case letters), designed for legibility at small font sizes and on outdoor signs. PT Sans also includes a condensed version in regular and bold without italics. In caption styles, PT Serif has a caption italic style while PT Sans has a bold version. PT Mono includes regular and bold styles.
Commercial releases include for PT Sans additional light, demi-bold, extra bold and black weights, in regular, narrow, condensed and extra-condensed styles. PT Serif gains an additional 32 styles, with narrow and extended widths, black, extra-bold and demi-bold weights. The professional releases also add text figures and small caps.
PT Sans is included in the Fedora Linux package repository since February 2010,[6] in the Gentoo Linux repository since January 2011,[7] and in macOS since OS X Lion.[8]
In 2016, PT Astra Sans and PT Astra Serif fonts were developed for distribution with the Russian Astra Linux operating system. Both fonts are metrically compatible with Times New Roman.[9] [10] [11] In 2021, PT Astra Fact font was developed for distribution with the Astra Linux operating system. It is metrically compatible with Verdana.[12]