Deja Vu Fonts

Deja Vu Fonts

The DejaVu fonts are modifications of the Bitstream Vera fonts designed for greater coverage of Unicode, 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 wiki and a mailing list.

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 SuSE standard fonts. The fonts are free software, and may thus freely be embedded. DejaVu fonts can be obtained from the DejaVu project on SourceForge. Some GNU/Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Mandriva Linux) include DejaVu fonts in their default installation. The open source software OpenOffice includes DejaVu fonts in its installation packages. These fonts are also included in proprietary BlackBerry OS (under the name BBAlphaSans and BBAlphaSerif).