An open-source type family for general typesetting (screen and print), intended to eventually reach professional quality. It is closely based on Bruce Rogers' much-loved Centaur typeface, but with a new italic that shares the essential characteristics of the roman, rather than the Arrighi italic which typically accompanied Centaur but was conceived independently. Possibly in future an italic based on the Arrighi will be offered as well.
You can find the most recent release of Coelacanth here or at Font Library.
Coelacanth offers numerous features:
- Roman and italic
- Six weights (extra-light, light, regular, semibold, bold, heavy)
- Small capitals and petite capitals
- Six optical sizes, to provide elegance at large sizes and legibility at small sizes
- Numerals available in lining and non-lining, proportional and tabular variants
- Extensive glyphs for European and African languages, plus Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew
- A wide variety of other useful glyphs
- Many OpenType features for professional typesetting
Coelacanth is developed using FontForge, with 9 master fonts for roman and (soon to be) 9 master fonts for italic. These are interpolated to generate the various weights and optical sizes. It is a work in progress, though the roman family is already very highly featured. Substantial changes are still expected, such as changes in the design and spacing of bold and heavy fonts. As yet, the italic is only available in a single weight and optical size, but I'm working to remedy this.
For quality printing, the optical sizes are designed to be used over the following ranges:
- Pearl: 4–5pt
- Subcapt: 5.6–6.9pt
- Caption: 7–10.9pt
- Regular: 11–17.2pt
- Subhd: 17.3–32.9pt
- Display: 33pt and up.
On-screen, pixelated displays give much less resolution than print, so I recommend using smaller optical sizes for easy reading.