, as well as providing more styles. The Bitstream Vera family was limited mainly to the characters in the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement portions of Unicode (roughly equivalent to ISO-8859-15) but was released with a license that permitted changes. The DejaVu fonts project was started with the aim to "provide a wider range of characters... while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development". The development of the fonts is done by many contributors, and is organized through a
The DejaVu fonts project was started by Štěpán Roh. Over time, it has absorbed several other projects that also existed to extend the Bitstream Vera typefaces; these projects include the Olwen Font Family, Bepa, Arev Fonts (only partially), and the
standard fonts. The fonts are
, and may thus freely be embedded. DejaVu fonts can be obtained from the
. Some GNU/Linux distributions (such as
) include DejaVu fonts in their default installation. The open source software
includes DejaVu fonts in its installation packages. These fonts are also included in proprietary
Recently there has been some question within the DejaVu community about the role of scripts typographically incompatible with the typographically-similar scripts
(LGC). Most notably,
has been added, but it has caused some software compatibility issues. Further, Latin and Arabic scripts have fundamentally different approaches to typefaces: while Latin fonts have
). It is still uncertain how the project should handle the mixture between different Latin faces and the different Arabic faces.
, a subset of the DejaVu fonts which contains only Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic characters. This version also tends not to experience as many software issues.
DejaVu is an active project, which aims for complete coverage of the alphabetic scripts, abjads, and symbols with all characters that are part of the MES-1, MES-2, and hopefully MES-3 subsets of Unicode. The coverage is already considerable, although some more work is needed to include more hinting rules for clear results at small sizes. Some kerning rules are still being developed for the Sans and Serif styles, for fine typography. Some work is still also needed to create ligatures in these styles.
As of version 2.32, it included characters from the following Unicode blocks. (The fraction given is the number of characters in each block that are included in the DejaVu fonts.)
Plane 0: Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) Range: 0000-FFFF (0-65,535) |
| C0 Controls and Basic Latin (95/95) |
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| C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement (96/96) |
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| Latin Extended-A (128/128) |
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| Latin Extended-B (208/208) |
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IPA ExtensionsThe International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
(96/96) |
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| Spacing Modifier Letters (63/80) |
|
| Combining Diacritical Marks (93/112) |
|
| Greek and Coptic (134/134) |
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| Cyrillic The Cyrillic script is encoded in four blocks in Unicode, all in BMP:* Cyrillic: , 256 characters* Cyrillic Supplement: , 48 characters* Cyrillic Extended-A: , 32 characters* Cyrillic Extended-B: , 96 characters...
(256/256) |
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| Cyrillic Supplement The Cyrillic script is encoded in four blocks in Unicode, all in BMP:* Cyrillic: , 256 characters* Cyrillic Supplement: , 48 characters* Cyrillic Extended-A: , 32 characters* Cyrillic Extended-B: , 96 characters...
(36/38) |
|
| Armenian The Armenian alphabet is an alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. It was devised by Saint Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader, and contained originally 36 letters. Two more letters, օ and ֆ, were added in the Middle Ages...
(86/86) |
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| Hebrew (54/87) |
|
| Arabic As of Unicode 6.0, the following blocks encode Arabic characters:*Arabic *Arabic Supplement *Arabic Presentation Forms-A...
(161/250) |
|
N'KoN'Ko is both a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949 as a writing system for the Mande languages of West Africa, and the name of the literary language itself written in the script. The term N'Ko means 'I say' in all Manding languages....
(54/59) |
|
ThaiThai script , is used to write the Thai language and other, minority, languages in Thailand. It has forty-four consonants , fifteen vowel symbols that combine into at least twenty-eight vowel forms, and four tone marks ....
(1/87) |
|
| Lao The Lao alphabet, Aksone Lao , is the main script used to write the Lao language and other minority languages in Laos. It is ultimately of Indic origin, the alphabet includes 27 consonants , 7 consonantal ligatures , 33 vowels , and 4 tone marks...
(65/65) |
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GeorgianThe Georgian alphabet is the writing system used to write the Georgian language and other Kartvelian languages , and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus such as Ossetic and Abkhaz during the 1940s...
(83/83) |
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| Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (404/640) |
|
| Ogham (29/29) |
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| Phonetic Extensions (106/128) |
|
| Phonetic Extensions Supplement (38/64) |
|
| Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement (6/42) |
|
| Latin Extended Additional (252/256) |
|
| Greek Extended (233/233) |
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| General Punctuation (107/107) |
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Superscripts and SubscriptsUnicode has subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, chemical and certain other equations to be represented in plain text without using any form of markup like HTML or TeX.The World Wide Web...
(34/34) |
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| Currency Symbols (23/25) |
|
| Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols (7/33) |
|
Letterlike SymbolsLetterlike Symbols are graphemes which are constructed mainly from the glyphs of one or more letters.In Unicode, Letterlike Symbols are placed in the block U+2100–214F, as in the following table.-See also:*Mapping of Unicode characters...
(75/80) |
|
Number FormsNumber Forms are Unicode characters which have specific meaning as numbers, but are constructed from other characters. They consist primarily of vulgar fractions and roman numerals. They are placed in the Unicode codepoint range 0x2150 through 0x218F , except for three fractions in ISO-8859-1...
(55/58) |
|
ArrowsAn arrow is a graphical symbol such as → or ←, used to point or indicate direction, being in its simplest form a line segment with a triangle affixed to one end, and in more complex forms a representation of an actual arrow...
(112/112) |
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| Mathematical Operators (256/256) |
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| Miscellaneous Technical (117/232) |
|
| Control Pictures (2/39) |
|
| Enclosed Alphanumerics (10/160) |
|
Box DrawingBox drawing characters, also known as line drawing characters, or pseudographics, are widely used in text user interfaces to draw various frames and boxes...
(128/128) |
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| Block Elements (32/32) |
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Geometric ShapesGeometric Shapes is a Unicode block of 96 symbols at codepoint range U+25A0-25FF.-U+25A0-U+25CF:-U+25D0-U+25FF:-Font coverage:Only two font sets—Code2000 and the DejaVu family—include coverage for each of the glyphs in the Geometric Shapes range, Unifont also contains all the glyphs...
(96/96) |
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Miscellaneous SymbolsThe Miscellaneous Symbols Unicode block contains various glyphs representing things from a variety of categories: Astrological, Astronomical, Chess, Dice, Ideological symbols, Musical notation, Political symbols, Recycling, Religious symbols, Trigrams, Warning signs and Weather.-Tables:Note: These...
(186/250) |
|
DingbatA dingbat is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a "printer's ornament" or "printer's character"....
s (174/175) |
|
| Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A (9/44) |
|
| Supplemental Arrows-A (16/16) |
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| Braille Patterns (256/256) |
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| Supplemental Arrows-B (128/128) |
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| Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B (13/128) |
|
| Supplemental Mathematical Operators (72/256) |
|
| Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (35/87) |
|
| Latin Extended-C (31/32) |
|
| Tifinagh Tifinagh is a series of abjad and alphabetic scripts used by some Berber peoples, notably the Tuareg, to write their language.A modern derivate of the traditional script, known as Neo-Tifinagh, was introduced in the 20th century...
(55/55) |
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| Supplemental Punctuation (6/50) |
|
Yijing Hexagram SymbolsThe I Ching or "Yì Jīng" , also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts...
(64/64) |
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| Cyrillic Extended-B The Cyrillic script is encoded in four blocks in Unicode, all in BMP:* Cyrillic: , 256 characters* Cyrillic Supplement: , 48 characters* Cyrillic Extended-A: , 32 characters* Cyrillic Extended-B: , 96 characters...
(31/78) |
|
| Modifier Tone Letters (20/32) |
|
| Latin Extended-D (57/114) |
|
| Alphabetic Presentation Forms (58/58) |
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| Arabic Presentation Forms-A As of Unicode 6.0, the following blocks encode Arabic characters:*Arabic *Arabic Supplement *Arabic Presentation Forms-A...
(98/595) |
|
| Variation Selectors (16/16) |
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| Combining Half Marks (4/7) |
|
| Arabic Presentation Forms-B As of Unicode 6.0, the following blocks encode Arabic characters:*Arabic *Arabic Supplement *Arabic Presentation Forms-A...
(141/141) |
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| Specials Specials is the name of a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, 5 are assigned as of Unicode 6.0:, marks start of annotated text, marks start of annotating text, marks end of annotating text, placeholder in the...
(5/5) |
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Plane 1: Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP) Range: 10000-1FFFF (65,536-131,071) |
Tai Xuan Jing SymbolsThe text Tài Xuán Jīng was composed by the Confucian writer Yáng Xióng . The first draft of this work was completed in 2BCE...
(87/87) |
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| Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols is a Unicode block of Latin and Greek letters and decimal digits that enable mathematicians to denote different notions with different letter styles .Unicode now includes many such symbols Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols is a Unicode block of Latin and Greek...
(117/996) |
|
| Domino Tiles (100/100) |
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