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History and Menu Info
Source Sans Pro was designed by Paul D. Hunt under the guidance of Robert Slimbach. It was Adobe’s first open source typeface family, conceived primarily as a typeface for user interfaces. Source Sans Pro draws inspiration from the clarity and legibility of twentieth-century American gothic typeface designs. Distilling the best archetypical qualities of these models, Paul followed a rational design approach by simplifying glyph shapes by paring them to their essential form. However, in order to more easily differentiate similar letter shapes (such as uppercase I and lowercase L), some additional details have been added. Besides providing such explicitly clarity in short text strings, another fundamental design consideration was to create a typeface that reads well in extended settings. This can be seen in the general proportions: Source Sans Pro has been designed with a more generous width than many other comparable gothics, and its shorter majuscule letters, combined with minuscule letters with longer extenders, create a more pleasant reading texture in longer text passages.
Source Sans Pro currently supports a wide range of languages using Latin script. Additionally, this family's non-italic fonts support modern and polytonic Greek, and also feature coverage for extended Cyrillic. Other members of the greater Source type system include Source Code Pro, a monospaced version of Source Sans designed specifically for coding, and Source Serif Pro. As an open source project, it is expected that incremental updates will be made over time to extend glyph set coverage and functionality. If you are interested in contributing to this open source project, please visit this project page on GitHub for information on how to become involved. Source Sans Pro can be adapted and redistributed according to the terms of the Open Font License (OFL) agreement.
In many Windows® applications, instead of every font appearing on the menu, fonts are grouped into style-linked sets, and only the name of the base style font for a set is shown in the menu. The italic and the bold weight fonts of the set (if any) are not shown in the font menu, but can still be accessed by selecting the base style font, and then using the italic and bold style buttons. In this family, such programs will show only the following base style font names in the menu:
- Source Sans Pro
- Source Sans Pro Black
- Source Sans Pro ExtraLight
- Source Sans Pro Light
- Source Sans Pro Semibold
Menu Name + Style Option = select this font
- Source Sans Pro + Italic = Source Sans Pro Italic
- Source Sans Pro + Bold = Source Sans Pro Bold
- Source Sans Pro + Bold Italic = Source Sans Pro Bold Italic
- Source Sans Pro Black + Italic = Source Sans Pro Black Italic
- Source Sans Pro ExtraLight + Italic = Source Sans Pro ExtraLight Italic
- Source Sans Pro Light + Italic = Source Sans Pro Light Italic
- Source Sans Pro Semibold + Italic + Source Sans Pro Semibold Italic
On the Mac OS operating system, although each font appears as a separate entry on the font menu, users may also select fonts by means of style links. Selecting a base style font and then using the style links (as described above for Windows applications) enhances cross-platform document compatibility with many applications, such as Microsoft Word, although it is unnecessary with more sophisticated Adobe applications such as recent versions of Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign software.
One should not, however, select a base font which has no style-linked variant, and then use the bold or italic styling button. Doing so will either have no effect, or result in programmatic bolding or slanting of the base font, which will usually produce inferior screen and print results.
Some glyphs in the font cannot be accessed unless you are using an OpenType compatible application.
If you require technical assistance, please email us at type-questions@adobe.com. Font specific resources can also be found on the Adobe Type user-to-user forums.