Created: 2015-09-05
Modified: 2020-10-02
The msg Research division of the msg group wants to use professional typography in the following four usage contexts:
- Adobe Creative Suite products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign)
- Micosoft Office products (PowerPoint, Word)
- HTML5 Single-Page-Applications (SPA)
- Web-Sites
For this, professional fonts are required which cover the following four major use cases:
- Edge: For caption and discreet text. (all regular use)
- Text: For regular body text. (all regular use)
- Head: For header and call-out text. (all regular use)
- Note: For scripted and annotated text only. (exceptional and very spare use only)
- Code: For mono-spaced and source-code text only. (exceptional and very spare use only)
- Deco: For stand-alone quotes and decorative text only. (exceptional and very spare use only)
As most commercial fonts cannot be used unrestricted (especially when it comes to embedding the font and wide spreading the results), Open Source licensed fonts are used. The TypoPRO project provides an extensive and hand-collected set of those fonts. Inspired by TypoPRO, we have chosen 24 individual fonts to cover the above six major use cases and prepared the fonts for the above four usage contexts. The font sources are:
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Adobe Source Sans Pro 3.006 (2019-09)
https://adobe-fonts.github.io/source-sans-pro/
https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans-pro/
Open Font License 1.1 -
Kalam 1.020 (2014)
http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Kalam
http://www.google.com/fonts#UsePlace:use/Collection:Kalam
Open Font License 1.1 -
Overlock 1.002 (2006)
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/overlock
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/download/overlock Open Font License 1.1 -
Hack 3.003 (2018)
http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/
https://github.com/chrissimpkins/Hack/releases SIL, Bitstream Vera License, Public Domain
The particular preparation consists of mapping font family names, font weights and font styles in the following way:
-------------------------------- -----------------------------
SOURCE: TARGET:
--------------- -------- ------- -------------- ------ -------
Family Weight Style Family Weight Style
--------------- -------- ------- -------------- ------ -------
Source Sans Pro Light Regular msg Edge Normal Regular
Source Sans Pro Light Italic msg Edge Normal Italic
Source Sans Pro Normal Regular msg Edge Bold Regular
Source Sans Pro Normal Italic msg Edge Bold Italic
--------------- -------- ------- -------------- ------ -------
Source Sans Pro Normal Regular msg Text Normal Regular
Source Sans Pro Normal Italic msg Text Normal Italic
Source Sans Pro SemiBold Regular msg Text Bold Regular
Source Sans Pro SemiBold Italic msg Text Bold Italic
--------------- -------- ------- -------------- ------ -------
Source Sans Pro Semibold Regular msg Head Normal Regular
Source Sans Pro Semibold Italic msg Head Normal Italic
Source Sans Pro Bold Regular msg Head Bold Regular
Source Sans Pro Bold Italic msg Head Bold Italic
--------------- -------- ------- -------------- ------ -------
Kalam Light Regular msg Note Normal Regular
Kalam Light Regular msg Note Normal Italic
Kalam Normal Regular msg Note Bold Regular
Kalam Normal Regular msg Note Bold Italic
--------------- -------- ------- -------------- ------ -------
Hack Normal Regular msg Code Normal Regular
Hack Normal Italic msg Code Normal Italic
Hack Bold Regular msg Code Bold Regular
Hack Bold Italic msg Code Bold Italic
--------------- -------- ------- -------------- ------ -------
Overlock Normal Regular msg Deco Normal Regular
Overlock Normal Regular msg Deco Normal Italic
Overlock Bold Italic msg Deco Bold Regular
Overlock Bold Italic msg Deco Bold Italic
--------------- -------- ------- -------------- ------ -------
Notice the following cruxes here:
-
The "msg Text Bold" intentionally uses just the semi-bold variant of the underlying Source Sand Pro font family, as the regular bold variant optically is too heavy.
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The "msg Edge Bold" intentionally equals "msg Text Normal" and "msg Text Bold" intentionally equals "msg Head Normal" as it is not the intention to provide a total of six weights with msg Edge/Text/Head. Instead, each one of msg Edge/Text/Head is intended for a particular, separate use-case and should be of the best weight in its Normal weight and still provide a "somewhat" bolder weight in its Bold weight. As a result, msg Edge/Text/Head technically consists of 6 weights, but optically consists of just 4 weights. The second reason for this special mapping is that the original (and now unused) ExtraLight weight of Source Sans Pro is nearly unreadable on beamer presentations and the original (and now also unused) Black weight of Source Sans Pro is nearly unreadable at small sizes.
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The "msg Note" font family actually uses the font family Kalam twice: once for the regular style and once again for the italic style. The reason is that there is no suitable script font which includes both regular and italic style as the regular style of a script font usually is already "italic" or oblique.
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The "msg Note", "msg Code" and "msg Deco" fonts were manually resized (through manipulation of the TTF head/unitsPerEm setting) to fix the x-height of msg Edge/Text/Head.
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The "msg Code" font was manually compressed (through manipulation of the TTF hmtx/mtx/weight settings) to optically better fit "msg Text".
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The above mapping results in exactly four fonts per font family to ensure the resulting fonts can be easily used even in the Microsoft Office products where under Windows one can only choose the font family and then just optionally enable bold weight and/or italic style.
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Stage 1:
Here we downloaded the individual source font files.-
msg-Fonts-1-SRC/*:
The downloaded font files. -
msg-Fonts-1-SRC-Downloads.txt:
The download URLs.
-
-
Stage 2: Here we converted and patched the fonts according to the above preparation.
-
msg-Fonts-2-GEN/*:
The patch files for changing the font files in batch. -
msg-Fonts-2-GEN-Conversion.sh:
The batch script for the conversion/preparation procedure.
-
-
Stage 3: Here we provide the resulting fonts for Desktop Publishing (DTP) with the two usage contexts Adobe Creative Suite products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) and Micosoft Office products (PowerPoint, Word).
-
msg-Fonts-3-DTP/*:
The individual resulting font files. -
msg-Fonts-3-DTP-Windows-System-Install.bat,
msg-Fonts-3-DTP-Windows-System-Uninstall.bat,
msg-Fonts-3-DTP-Windows-User-Install.bat,
msg-Fonts-3-DTP-Windows-User-Uninstall.bat,
msg-Fonts-3-DTP-Windows-Util.ps1:
The batch scripts to install/uninstall the DTP fonts under Windows, either locally for the current user or globally for the system (required administrator privileges). -
msg-Fonts-3-DTP-macOS-System-Install.bat,
msg-Fonts-3-DTP-macOS-System-Uninstall.bat,
msg-Fonts-3-DTP-macOS-User-Install.bat,
msg-Fonts-3-DTP-macOS-User-Uninstall.bat:
The batch scripts to install/uninstall the DTP fonts under macOS, either locally for the current user or globally for the system (required administrator privileges). -
msg-Fonts-3-DTP-Specimen-1-refer.pptx:
The font specimen in PowerPoint format, referencing installed fonts. -
msg-Fonts-3-DTP-Specimen-2-embed.pptx:
The font specimen in PowerPoint format, embedding the fonts. -
msg-Fonts-3-DTP-Specimen-3-export.pdf:
The font specimen in exported PDF format.
-
-
Stage 4: Here we provide the resulting fonts for the Web and the two usage contexts HTML5 Single-Page-Applications (SPA) and Web-Sites.
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msg-Fonts-4-WEB:
The individual resulting font files. -
msg-Fonts-4-WEB-Specimen-1-refer.html:
The font specimen in HTML format, referencing local fonts. -
msg-Fonts-4-WEB-Specimen-2-embed.html:
The font specimen in HTML format, embedding the fonts. -
msg-Fonts-4-WEB-Specimen-3-export.pdf:
The font specimen in exported PDF format.
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Dr. Ralf S. Engelschall
Director msg Research
ralf.engelschall@msg.group