Adobe announced a lot of new Web development tools today at its Create The Web keynote. The company hopes developers and creators will use its newly Edge tools to push the Web forward. Two of the Edge tools announced today were Edge Web Fonts and Typekit, both of which feature open source fonts. Joining the launch of these tools, Adobe is also releasing new open source fonts.
Adobe announced today the release of its second open source typeface family, Source Code Pro. The new monospaced typeface family was designed by the Paul Hunt and the Adobe Type team. He based his work on the previously released Sources Sans Pro.
Hunt says that the design of Source Code Pro was inspired by his own desire to have a “coding font that [he] would want to use [himself].” He goes on to say that he had to adapt his design to avoid the problems that usually plague monospace text. Most of the work went into differentiating characters that looked similar to one another. He also worked to make the letters and numbers flow without tiring the eyes of coders.
Unfortunately, he will not be able to release bitmaps for the new fonts. He felt that it was more prudent to target rendering antialiased rendering environments since so much work is done on devices that feature Retina Displays, Clear Type and other font smoothing options.
As with all open source projects, the new Source Code Pro fonts are available for free. you can get them right now at Adobe’s SourceForge page. Adobe also encourages developers and designers to clone and fork the project on GitHub. The fonts are also available on various Web portals like Edge Web Fonts, TypeKit and Google Web Fonts.